The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by E. Ray Lankester.

Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by E. Ray Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    537/938 (page 33)
    ONTOGENY. fossils, other records of the history of the origin of organ- isms, which in many cases are of no less value, nay, in several cases are of much greater value, than fossils. By far the most important of these other records of creation is, without doubt, ontogeny, that is, the history of the develop- ment of the organic individual (embryology and metamor- phology). It briefly repeats in great and marked features the series of forms which the ancestors of the respective individuals have passed through from the beginning of their tribe. We have designated the palseontological history of the development of the ancestors of a living form as the history of a tribe, or ]}hylogeny, and we may therefore thus enunciate this exceedingly important biogenetic fundamental prineiple: Ontogeny is a short and quick repetition, or recapitulation, of Phylogeny, determined by the laws of In- heritance anxd Adaptation. As every animal and every plant from the beginning of its individual existence passes through a series of different forms, it indicates in rapid succession and in general outlines the long and slowly changing series of states of form which its progenitors have passed through from the most ancient times. (Gen. Morph. ii. 6, 110, 800.) It is true that the sketch which the ontogeny of or- ganisms gives us of their phylogeny is in most cases more or less obscured, and all the more so the more Adaptation, in the course of time, has predominated over Inheritance, and the more powerfully the law of abbreviated inheritance, and the law of correlative adaptation, have exerted their influence. However, this does not lessen the great value which the actual and faithfully preserved features of that sketch possess. Ontogeny is of the most inestimable value