26 GENESIS OF MAN. 



conclusions respecting the significance of this marvellous co-inci- 

 dence. The believers in miracles, who refuse to accept this ex- 

 planation, will have discovered the most miraculous of all miracles. 

 The singular alleged action of Providence in stirring fossil shells 

 and bones into the earth, of which the mountains were made, " as 

 a cook stirs raisins into a pudding," would be an intelligible phe- 

 nomenon compared with this. That a man should begin his 

 existence as an amoeba, should subsequently turn into a worm, a 

 little later should become a lamprey, later still a fish, and after pass- 

 ing through amphibian, reptilian, monotreme, marsupial, lemurian, 

 and simian forms, should at last emerge with the human shape, — 

 this series of remarkable metamorphoses, if required to be explained 

 on the assumption that it is directed by the arbitrary will of the 

 Creator, would furnish a more fatal stumbling-block than even 

 the presence of those useless and usually deleterious rudimentary 

 organs, which all higher animals are found to possess. For 

 even if we can bring ourselves to comprehend how the Creator 

 may, for some inscrutable reason, introduce many arbitrary irregu- 

 larities into his handiwork, according as he may be actuated by 

 this or that caprice, we are still at a loss to understand how he 

 should wish to carry on a whole system of freaks in the embryo, 

 which have a manifest correspondence with the mature forms of 

 life known to exist upon the globe, unless there be some causal 

 connection between the two systems. Nothing short of the most 

 complete abnegation of reason, nay, of a strong effort to accept 

 the unreasonable, can prevent the mind, cognizant of these two 

 series of facts, from becoming thoroughly convinced that such a 

 dependence must subsist. 



The science which embraces both the ontogenetic and the phy- 

 logenetic development of life, the genesis of life in general, is called 

 by Haeckel Biogenia, a science, as he remarks, as yet scarcely 

 founded. The law which expresses the relation between the 

 facts of ontogeny and the facts of phylogeny is, therefore, the 

 fundamental law of biogenia. Stated in the most direct manner, 

 this law is that " phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogene- 

 sis." From a somewhat altered point of view, the same idea is 

 conveyed by saying that ontogenesis is a brief recapitulation of phy- 

 logenesis, or, that the history of the germ {Keimesgeschichte) is an 

 abridgment ox epitome of the history of the race (Stammesgeschichte). 



