it THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 31 
vail, the jaws, separately or all together, and, as 
ypallanzani showed long ago, these parts not only 
“row again, but the redintegrated limb is formed 
on the same type as those which were lost. The 
new jaw, or leg, is a newt’s, and never by any 
accident more like that of a frog. What is true 
of the newt is true of every animal and of every 
lant; 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 
mor the maternal side of the house would be 
regarded as a kind of monster. 
_ §So that the one end to which, in all living 
beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one 
‘scheme which the Archzus of the old speculators 
‘strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the 
‘offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is 
ithe 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 
-hecessary consequence of the more general laws 
‘which govern matter; but, for the present, more 
ean hardly be said than that it appears to be in 
harmony with them. We know that the phe- 
nomena of vitality are not something apart from 
other physical phenomena, but one with them ; 
