144 Darwin as an Anthropologist 
cenogenesis. As early as 1874 I had emphasised, in the first chapter 
of my Evolution of Man, the importance of discriminating carefully 
between these two sets of phenomena: 
“In the evolutionary appreciation of the facts of embryology we 
must take particular care to distinguish sharply and clearly between 
the primary, palingenetic evolutionary processes and the secondary, 
cenogenetic processes. The palingenetic phenomena, or embryonic 
recapitulations, are due to heredity, to the transmission of characters 
from one generation to another. They enable us to draw direct 
inferences in regard to corresponding structures in the development 
of the species (e.g. the chorda or the branchial arches in all vertebrate 
embryos). The cenogenetic phenomena, on the other hand, or the 
embryonic variations, cannot be traced to inheritance from a mature 
ancestor, but are due to the adaption of the embryo or the larva to 
certain conditions of its individual development (e.g. the amnion, the 
allantois, and the vitelline arteries in the embryos of the higher 
vertebrates). These cenogenetic phenomena are later additions; we 
must not infer from them that there were corresponding processes in 
the ancestral history, and hence they are apt to mislead.” 
The fundamental importance of these facts of comparative anatomy, 
atavism, and the rudimentary organs, was pointed out by Darwin in 
the first part of his classic work, The Descent of Man and Selection 
in Relation to Sex (1871). In the “General summary and con- 
clusion” (chap. XXI.) he was able to say, with perfect justice: “He 
who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature 
as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a 
separate act of creation. He will be forced to admit that the close 
resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog— 
the construction of his skull, limbs, and whole frame on the same 
plan with that of other mammals, independently of the uses to which 
the parts may be put—the occasional reappearance of various struc- 
tures, for instance of several muscles, which man does not normally 
possess, but which are common to the Quadrumana—and a crowd of 
analogous facts—all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion 
that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common 
progenitor.” 
These few lines of Darwin’s have a greater scientific value than 
hundreds of those so-called “anthropological treatises,” which give 
detailed descriptions of single organs, or mathematical tables with 
series of numbers and what are claimed to be “exact analyses,” but 
are devoid of synoptic conclusions and a philosophical spirit. 
Charles Darwin is not generally recognised as a great anthro- 
pologist, nor does the school of modern anthropologists regard him 
1 Descent of Man (Popular Hdit.), p. 927. 
