262 LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS. [xn. 



accident more like that of a frog;. What is true of the 

 newt is true of every animal and of every plant ; the 

 acorn tends to build itself up again into a woodland 

 giant such as that from whose twig it fell ; the spore of 

 the humblest lichen reproduces the green or brown 

 incrustation which gave it birth ; and at the other end 

 of the scale of life, the child that resembled neither the 

 paternal nor the maternal side of the house would be 

 regarded as a kind of monster. 



So that the one end to which, in all living being's, the 

 formative impulse is tending — the one scheme which the 

 Archseus of the old speculators strives to carry out, 

 seenis to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of 

 the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, 

 that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, 

 more closely than anything else. 



Science will some day show us how this law is a 

 necessary consequence of the more general laws which 

 govern matter ; but, for the present, more can hardly be 

 said than that it appears to be in harmony with them. 

 We know that the phenomena of vitality arc not some- 

 thing apart from other physical phsenomena, but one 

 with them ; and matter and force are the two names of 

 the one artist who fashions the living as well as the life- 

 less. Hence living bodies should obey the same great 

 laws as other matter — nor, throughout Nature, is there a 

 •law of wider application than this, that a body impelled 

 by two forces takes the direction of their resultant. But 

 living bodies may be regarded as nothing but extremely 

 complex bundles of forces held in a mass of matter, as 

 the complex forces of a magnet are held in the steel by 

 its coercive force ; and, since the differences of sex arc 

 comparatively slight, or, in other words, the sum of the 

 forces in each has a very similar tendency, their re- 

 sultant, the offspring, may reasonably be expected to 



