‘A Garden of Primitive Flowers’

The nature of the child, as conceived by scholars of the time, was rooted in recapitulation theory. The father of the theory was unanimously regarded as Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and biologist, who had championed its tenets since his first major scientific work, the Generelle Morphologie der Organismen of 1866. Ernst Haeckel’s thesis (which in German is called the ‘fundamental biogenetic law’: biogenetisches Grundgesetz) stated that ontogeny was a short and fast recapitulation of phylogeny: in its development, the individual passes through twenty-two stages, the later ones being monera, amoeba, morula, gastrula, then fish, reptile, ape, and finally man.