found analogies in the embryos, but still a great many have never been found and it should not be expected that they will be found. No human embryo has been found that could be called a fish, but in all human embryos there are characteristics which are very similar to those possessed by a fish. But the real fish has in addition many more, which are peculiar to its species alone. So also at the fish-like stage the human embryo has characteristics and potentialities (hidden, it may be) all its own. The courses of development of the fish and man may have been, probably were, very similar up to a certain point, and then they diverged, each adding and eliminating such as were necessary for its own advancement. Thus animals that had originally the same progenitors may have become widely divergent, so much so that even their embryological features in their higher stages are entirely different. Though man starts life as a unicellular organism, there is no time when this organism is an amoeba or any other known animal. Though it may so closely resemble an amoeba as to be indistinguishable from one, yet we must admit that it possesses differences, dynamic relations, probably morphological differences if we had power to discern them, which mark it off from everything else.

Recapitulation Incomplete. The parallelism is inexact, i. e., recapitulation is not perfect. Although the animal may have passed through stages which have been demonstrated by paleontology, the exact parallelism cannot be detected by embryology, showing that some stages have dropped out and others been added. Cope says: "It is nevertheless true that the records brought to light by embryologists are very imperfect, and have to be carefully interpreted in order to furnish reliable evidence as to the phylogeny of the species examined. An illustration of this is the fact that the species characters appear in many embryos before those which define the order or the family, although it is certain that the latter appeared first in the order of time. Most of the important conclusions as to the phylogeny of Vertebrata demonstrated by paleontology have never been observed by embryologists in the records of the species studied by

them. Thus I have shown that it is certain that in the amniote vertebrates the intercentrum of the vertebral column has been replaced by the centrum; yet no evidence of this fact has been observed by an embryologist. If we could study the embryonic development of the vertebral column of the Permian or Triassic Reptilia, the transition would be observed, but in recent forms cænogeny has progressed so far that no trace of the stage where the intercentrum existed can be found."

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Marshall in maintaining that recapitulation is not perfect, shows how the embryo of a given stage of development cannot possibly represent exactly any other adult stage of existence. He says: "A chick embryo of say the fourth day is clearly not an animal capable of independent existence, and therefore cannot correctly represent any [adult?] ancestral condition, an objection which applies to the developmental history of many, perhaps of most animals." The record is "neither a complete nor a straightforward one. It is indeed a history, but a history of which entire chapters are lost, while in those that remain many pages are misplaced and others are so blurred as to be illegible; words, sentences, or entire paragraphs are omitted, and, worse still, alterations or spurious additions have been freely introduced by later hands, and at times so cunningly as to defy detection." 2

Further, "it is quite impossible that any animal, except perhaps in the lowest zoological groups, should repeat all the ancestral stages in the history of the race; the limits of time available for individual development will not permit this. There is a tendency in all animals toward condensation of the ancestral history, toward striking a direct path from the egg to the adult. This tendency is best marked in the higher, the more complicated members of a group-i. e., in those which have a longer and more tortuous pedigree."

3

Hall, who has promulgated the theory of recapitulation more than any other writer, says: "It is well to remember that from

1 Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, p. 209. Biological Lectures and Addresses, p. 306.

Ibid., p. 311.

a larger biological view, every higher animal is not only composed of organs phyletically old and new, but that the order of their development may even be changed. Basal and lapidary as is the great biogenic law that the individual recapitulates the growth stages of his race, the work of Appel, Keibel, Mehnert, and many others has demonstrated abundant inversions of it. The heart, e. g., in the individual develops before the bloodvessels, but this reverses the phylogenetic order. The walls of the large vessels develop before the blood-corpuscles, while the converse was true in the development of the species." 1

1

See The American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, Jan., 1899, article on "Hydro-Psychoses," for a fuller discussion by the author of the subject of recapitulation.

1 Adolescence, I, p. 55.

CHAPTER V

EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECAPITULATION

Education Should Follow Nature.-All the foregoing is extremely suggestive for education. It argues for an opportunity for the retracement of hereditary endowments and against forcing nature. It is equally important to argue against keeping the child so long in any stage as to produce arrest. Furthermore, progress is indicated by the fact that present generations remain so briefly in the lower types of structures and pass rapidly on to higher forms. This shows that nature causes each generation to select that which is vital and fundamental from the past and then builds upon that. What is proved to be of enduring worth is seized upon and made relatively permanent in the race. Here is the origin of instincts and the structures necessary to their functioning.

Life means successive change, modification, and selection of the most adaptable. Education is life and educative means should seek to work in harmony with the original plans of nature. At the same time we must not forget that the school and other educative means are included in nature. We should cease to say "man and nature"; man is the highest product of nature. Nature study is incomplete without a study of man. Educative means should represent the summum bonum in nature, and like more primitive nature, they should select the best for cultivation and preservation. Here selection should be conscious and intelligently purposive.

In addition to merely selecting the best traits and increasing their power through wise cultivation, the school should set up conscious ideals toward which the efforts of the school in cooperation with the individual are to be directed. By this means

the school becomes the highest instrument of evolution. By this means short circuits are produced and the individual is assisted without danger and in the most economical method to higher planes. The doctrine of recapitulation teaches how we may conserve the best, eliminate the undesirable, and lead to higher and higher development. It is a doctrine of promise and of hope!

Immutability of Mental Laws.-The theory of recapitulation re-enforces the idea that natural laws prevail in the mental world as in the physical. The popular mind in general has become accustomed to regarding physical occurrences as the result of natural laws. The idea of chance and superstitions regarding supernatural physical events are largely displaced by rational ideas of cause and effect. But scientific intelligence has not become so general regarding biological facts and changes, and still less so concerning mental phenomena. It is highly important that growth processes, both physical and psychical, should be understood as phenomena which are absolutely conditioned by laws as immutable as those governing the falling of a stone. It is only since a knowledge of the absolute relation between causes and effects has come to be understood and heeded in medicine that a science of healing has been made possible. Until it was accepted without reservation the physician was not much more than the "medicine man" dealing in charms, incantations, and sorcery. Until the same rational view comes to obtain concerning mental phenomena we cannot have a science of education, but must be enthralled by the veriest quackery.

Springs of Conduct.-Lloyd Morgan' wrote: "It must not be forgotten that, according to the view here adopted, all our instincts and all the more permanent traits of human character have been formed under the guidance of natural, individual, and social selection; such habits as were for the good of the species, crystallizing, or rather organizing, into instincts or permanent traits of character; such as were detrimental quietly dying out. Or, again, we may say that these instincts and traits of character 1 Springs of Conduct, p. 260.

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