animal ancestors of the said organism, or the ancestral forms of the
species, have passed through from the earliest period of organic life
down to the present day.

The causal character of the relation which connects embryology with
stem-history is due to the action of heredity and adaptation. When we
have rightly understood these, and recognised their great importance
in the formation of organisms, we can go a step further and say:
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.* (* The term
"genesis," which occurs throughout, means, of course, "birth" or
origin. From this we get: Biogeny = the origin of life (bios);
Anthropogeny = the origin of man (anthropos); Ontogeny = the origin of
the individual (on); Phylogeny = the origin of the species (phulon);
and so on. In each case the term may refer to the process itself, or
to the science describing the process.--Translator.) In other words,
the development of the stem, or race, is, in accordance with the laws
of heredity and adaptation, the cause of all the changes which appear
in a condensed form in the evolution of the foetus.

The chain of manifold animal forms which represent the ancestry of
each higher organism, or even of man, according to the theory of
descent, always form a connected whole. We may designate this
uninterrupted series of forms with the letters of the alphabet: A, B,
C, D, E, etc., to Z. In apparent contradiction to what I have said,
the story of the development of the individual, or the ontogeny of
most organisms, only offers to the observer a part of these forms; so
that the defective series of embryonic forms would run: A, B, D, F, H,
K, M, etc.; or, in other cases, B, D, H, L, M, N, etc. Here, then, as
a rule, several of the evolutionary forms of the original series have
fallen out. Moreover, we often find--to continue with our illustration