r repress, witness the "little mothers" of five and the wage
earners of twelve who have assumed all the responsibilities with all
that they entail of maturity. On the other side of the picture is the
indulged petted child of fortune who never grows up because he has had
everything done for him all his life, and therefore the tendencies which
normally might be expected to pass and give place to others remain and
those others never appear. That inborn tendencies do wax, reach a
maximum, and wane is probably true, but the onset is much more gradual
and the waning much less frequent than has been taken for granted. Our
ignorance concerning all these matters outweighs our knowledge; only
careful experimentation which allows for all the other factors involved
can give a reliable answer.

One reason why the facts of delayedness and transitoriness in instincts
have been so generally accepted without being thoroughly tested has been
the belief in the recapitulation or repeating by the individual of
racial development. So long as this was accepted as explaining the
development of inborn tendencies and their order of appearance,
transitoriness and delayedness must necessarily be postulated. This
theory is being seriously questioned by psychologists of note, and even
its strongest advocate, President Hall, finds many questions concerning
it which cannot be answered.

The chief reasons for its acceptance were first, on logical grounds as
an outgrowth of the doctrine of evolution, and second, because of an
analogy with the growth of the physical body which was pushed to an
extreme. On the physiological side, although there is some likeness
between the human embryo and that of the lower animals, still the stages
passed through by the two are not the same, being alike only in rough
outline, and only in the case of a few of the bodily organs is the
series of changes similar. In the case of the physical structure which
should be recapitulated most closely, if behavior is to follow the same
law,--namely, in that of the brain and nervous system,--there is least
evidence of recapitulation. The brain of man does not follow in its
development at all the same course taken in the development of brains in
the lower animals. And, moreover, it is perfectly possible to explain
any similarity or parallelism which does exist between the development
of man's embryo and that of lower animals by postulating a general order
of development followed by na