Tlic Study of Animal Life 





One must be careful not to press the idea of recapitulation 

 too far, (i) because the individual life-history tends to skip 

 stages which occurred in the an- 

 cestral progress ; (2) because the 

 young animal may acquire new 

 characters which are peculiar to 

 its own near hneage and have 

 little or no importance in connec- 

 -^ tion with the general evolution of 

 ~ its race ; (3) because, in short, 

 13 the resemblance between the indi- 

 .3 vidual and racial history (so far 

 '^ as we know them) is general, not 



2 precise. Thus we regard Nauplius 

 — and Zoea rather as adaptive larval 

 «j forms than as representatives of 

 ^ ancestral crustaceans. More- 

 •a over, if one insists too much on 

 S the approximate parallelism be- 

 ■g tween the life-history of the indi- 

 I vidual and the progress of the 

 0^ race, one is apt to overlook the 

 ° deeper problem — how it is that 



the recapitulation occurs to the 

 'Si extent that it undoubtedly does. 

 ■J The organism has no feeling for 



1 history that it should tread a 



3 sometimes circuitous path, be- 



2 cause its far-off ancestors did so. 

 To some extent we may think of 

 inherited constitution as if it were 

 the hand of the past upon the 

 organism, compelling it to become 

 thus or thus, but we must realise 

 that this is a living not a dead 

 Iiand ; in other words these meta- 

 morphoses have their efficient causes in the actual con- 

 ditions of g-rowth and development. The suggestion of 

 Kleinenberg referred to in a preceding chapter helps us, for 



