30 The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy 



living would, for the rest, afford but an unsafe basis for the 

 reconstruction of ancient faunas and floras, since experience 

 teaches that the biogenetic law is frequently veiled or completely 

 obscured owing to various causes." 



Concluding a series of illustrations of the absurdities to follow 

 from an unchecked use of the law this authority remarks that 

 these few instances "may suffice to show how trivial are the 

 discoveries concerning existence in earlier periods of earth- 

 history that can follow from ontogenetic researches alone." 4 ' 

 Cope and others were interested in collecting particular in- 

 stances of recapitulation and these appear in the text-books. 

 They are conveniently presented by Woodward in the follow- 

 ing paragraph: ^f 



"Thpreis nn doubt, for example, that Jrjuthe. course of the 

 in dividual development the'homocercal tail of a.. modern_bony 

 fish passes through .the same, stages as those successively—ex- 

 JSSrfcerMjyjlhe majority of .the_aduU-fishes.at.the-dlffer.ent_ge_o- 

 logi caL epochsT !TJlis^also^y^nt_that _the_fajni|yLi3f jiee^. (Cef- 

 victae) hasgradually acquTred^compIex antlers m precisely the 

 samfi-JiiannerTis-e^^ them "during the 



course cT ltsH K alvidu aT~Tif e . Again" the " "cloven foot"' ' of the 

 eld^tihg^ummant appears-in the embryo with separated meta- 

 podial bones, like those of the adult ancestral ruminants. It is 

 also tolerably certain (though fossils have not yet provided 

 absolute demonstration) that the rudimentary teeth and hind 

 limbs of the existing whale bone whales (Mystacoceti) are in- 

 herited from functionally toothed quadrupedal ancestors." 47 



_In Osborn's "Ev olu tion of Mam maHan Molar Teeth" this 

 example o f recapitula tion- is -io__he_fourid, 



"In the lower molar teeth the order of calcification is precisely 



lAe^HSrSE^SutipiiXr. . . So welind thatjheorder of embryonic* 

 ^development exactly repeatsfne order ofTilstoricaI~development 



. . . .BuL Jhis, ^„is-nol exactly the case in the "upper molars. 



Nevertheless,„x»uLat eight cusps in. the upper and Tower "molars 

 ' considered together, six cusps calcify in the order in whichTBfey 



were successively added to the single reptilian cone." 48 



And from the same authority — this note, 



"The recent discovery of the modes of origin of the horns in 

 the titanotheres, a perissodactyl group remotely related to 



« Natural Science, Vol. 6, 1895: pp. 308, 309. 



«7 Outlines of Vertebrate Palaeontology, 1898, p. xxiii. 



«» p. 65. 



