provoke a fresh inquiry into the origin of the human race, and this
has proved beyond question our gradual evolution from the lower
species. We give the name of "Phylogeny" to the science which
describes this ascent of man from the lower ranks of the animal world.
The chief source that it draws upon for facts is "Ontogeny," or
embryology, the science of the development of the individual organism.
Moreover, it derives a good deal of support from paleontology, or the
science of fossil remains, and even more from comparative anatomy, or
morphology.

These two branches of our science--on the one side ontogeny or
embryology, and on the other phylogeny, or the science of
race-evolution--are most vitally connected. The one cannot be
understood without the other. It is only when the two branches fully
co-operate and supplement each other that "Biogeny" (or the science of
the genesis of life in the widest sense) attains to the rank of a
philosophic science. The connection between them is not external and
superficial, but profound, intrinsic, and causal. This is a discovery
made by recent research, and it is most clearly and correctly
expressed in the comprehensive law which I have called "the
fundamental law of organic evolution," or "the fundamental law of
biogeny." This general law, to which we shall find ourselves
constantly recurring, and on the recognition of which depends one's
whole insight into the story of evolution, may be briefly expressed in
the phrase: "The history of the foetus is a recapitulation of the
history of the race"; or, in other words, "Ontogeny is a
recapitulation of phylogeny." It may be more fully stated as follows:
The series of forms through which the individual organism passes
during its development from the ovum to the complete bodily structure
is a brief, condensed repetition of the long series of forms which the