discovered at all. In the second place, we see in the young bird in the egg the reproduction of two consecutive ancestral stages: one in the fish gills, the other in the lizard-like teeth. Once the law is admitted, there can be nothing strange in this. If one ancestral stage, that of the fish, is reproduced in the young animal belonging to a higher group, why not several?—why not all of them? No doubt, the ancestral series of the higher forms is of enormous length. What an immense number of stages there must have been before the fish! And then we have still the amphibian, the lizard, and the bird or mammal, up to man.
"Why should not the law run: the whole ancestral series must be reproduced in the development of each individual organism? We are now in a position to see the whole bearing of Haeckel's idea."
In analogy with this, is it not true that every thinking man and woman in the course of his or her development, epitomizes the history of human thought? To be more specific, I take it that you, reader, are an educated man of middle-class origin, and that you have been a socialist for at least six months, and have, of course, read Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific."