1896.] Lost Characteristics. 1 



and further to make his meaning clearer, on page 11 he divides cW MgWMt ic ph. 

 nomena into " Ortsverschiebungen oder Ileterotopien," and, on page 12, "Zei 

 verschiebungen oder Heterochronies" Organs or parts may be developed het< 

 rotopieally, that is, out of place or in a different part of the body from thai i 

 which they originated in the ancestors ; or heterochronically, that is earlier i 



jective applied in this country many years beforehand, but that fact does not 

 seem to have been considered worthy of his attention. Haeckel then proceeds to 

 add: " Das umgekehrte gilt von der verspiiteU-n Au.sbildungdesDarmcanals, der 

 r.t-iU-h .hlc d*T i M-ilileclitsorgane. Hier Hegt offenbar eine V« r . 

 Verspiitung, eine ontogenetische Retardation." This is probably what Cope al- 

 ludes to in his quotation of Haeckel, and certainly this is a restatement of Cope's 

 law of retardation with, however, the ommission of any reference to the original 

 discoverer. It will be gathered from the text above that I view acceleration 

 firstly, as a normal mode of action or tendency of heredity acting upon all 

 characters that are genetic, or, in other words, derived from ancestral sources ; 

 secondly, that a ctetic, or, in other words, a newly acquired character must be- 

 come genetic before it becomes subject to the law of tachygenesis. Haeckel has 

 evidently confused ctetic characters like those of the so called ovum of Taenia, 

 the Pluteus of Echinoderms and the grub, maggot, caterpillars of insects, which 

 have caused the young to deviate more or less from the normal line of develop- 

 ment, as determined by the more generalized development of allied types of the 

 same divisions of the animal kingdom, with the normal characters that are in- 

 herited at an early stage in the ontogeny and considers them all as heterochronic. 

 It is very obvious that they are quite disti ctetic characters 



may have been larval or even possibly embryonic in origin, and may not have 

 affected perceptibly the adult stage at any time in the phylogeny of the group, 

 they are, nevertheless, subject to the law of acceleration and do affect the earliest 

 stages as has been shown in Hyatt's and Arm's book on Insecta. Such character- 

 istics do, of course, contradict the record, if we consider that the record ought 

 have been made by nature according to anthropomorphic standards, and in such 

 misleading phraseology they are falsifications of the ontogenetic recapitulation of 



standards, such expressions are inadmissable. There is absolutely no evidence 

 that characteristics repeated in the younger stages of successive species and types 

 owe their likeness to ancestral characters to other causes than heredity. This 

 likeness may be interfered with or temporarily destroyed by extraordinary 

 changes of habit, as among the larvae of some insecta and the forms alluded to 

 above, or among parasites in different degrees, but the obvious gradations of struct- 

 ures in many of these series show that hereditary tendencies are not easily changed 



even among the parasites. It is also evident that the novel larval characters 

 originating in the young in their turn speedily become hereditary and are incor- 



It may be seen from this genesis 



