aid in giving fitness to one's endeavor; but beneath all of these
architectural peculiarities lies the common biological foundation. To
know the human organism genetically, to have some knowledge of the
processes by which it reaches its normal organization, to appreciate the
crude and elemental struggle that has left its history in man's bodily
structure, to think in large biological terms that include, besides "the
physics and chemistry of living matter," considerations ethnological,
hereditary, and psychological, is to make fundamental preparation for
the understanding of boyhood.

For the family to which the boy belongs is the human family. His parents
alone and their characteristics do not explain him, nor does
contemporary environment, important as that is. His ancestry is the
human race, his history is their history, his impulses and his bodily
equipment from which they spring are the result of eons of strife,
survival, and habit. Four generations back he has not two but sixteen
parents. Thus he comes to us out of the great physical democracy of
mankind and doubtless with a tendency to re-live its ancient and
deep-seated experiences.

This theory of race recapitulation as applied to the succeeding stages
of boyhood may be somewhat more poetic than scientific. Genetically he
does those things for which at the time he has the requisite muscular
and nervous equipment, but the growth of this equipment gives him a
series of interests and expressions that run in striking parallel to
primitive life. If the enveloping society is highly civilized and
artificial, much of his primitive desire may be cruelly smothered or too
hastily refined or forced into a criminal course. But memory,
experience, observation, and experiment force one to note that the
parallel does exist and that it is vigorously and copiously attested by