Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/270

 254 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of a discoverer, Darwin perceived the accordance between this view and his own notions of organic development. The growth of the embryo thus became a picture of forms now extinct, or a map of the stages a species had traversed. After the pioneer came the toiler, to reap gloriously where he had not sown. Guided by a few lines in the Origin of Species, Hackel saw wider horizons open before him, and he proved the Columbus of a new biological continent. By investigating the evolution of the embryo, he was able for the first time to establish the pedigree of man.

The discovery furnishes the key to colonial evolution. A col- ony rehearses not only the main historical stages of the mother- land, but also those stages that precede history. In the move- ments of unrest and discontent* that issue in emigration, the political rebellions, the rise of new religious sects, the agitations and organizations that prepare it, colonial emigration recapitu- lates, and first makes visible and vivid, the embryonic prelimina- ries of the birth of European states, of which no record remains. The landing of the immigrants, we can hardly doubt, reproduces the colonization of the various motherlands, which myth and legend still appropriate. The relations they form with the natives, their collisions, associations, and intermarriages with them, their absorption or destruction of them, re-create the facts of the same order that marked in older countries the advent of an invading race. The foundation of the new states will often, as we shall find, bear witness to the formation of that derided social compact which the imagination of the elder philosophers perceived at the beginnings of all societies. Just as often will it witness to the formation of societies on the Filmerian principle of the expan- sion of the patriarchal family, or the Carlylean principle of mixed force and persuasion that constitutes hero-worship. We shall see the rudiments of political institutions, and will thus revive almost the earliest age of social man. A but slightly more recent epoch will be seen to live again in the patriarchal life that spread itself over the vast pampas of South America and the wide plains of Aus- tralia. Those political institutions that arise from coercion will again spring up from the relations of the immigrants with the