PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE 397 
‘some experimentalists have carefully examined the 
lower orders of animals,—among them the Abbé 
Spallanzani, who made a ite of experiments 
upon snails and salamanders,—and have found 
that they might mutilate them to an incredible 
pent ; that you might cut off the jaw or the 
greater part of the head, or the leg or the tail, and 
‘repeat the experiment several times, perhaps cut- 
ting off the same member again and again; and 
yet each of those types would be reproduced 
according to the primitive type: Nature making 
no mistake, never putting on a fresh kind of leg, 
or head, or tail, but always tending to repeat and 
to return to the primitive type. 
_ It.is the same in sexual reproduction : it is a 
matter of perfectly common experience, that the 
‘tendency on the part of the offspring always is, 
speaking broadly, to reproduce the form of the 
rents. The proverb has it that the thistle does 
a bring forth grapes ; so, among ourselves, there 
ways a likeness, more or less marked and dis- 
q between children and their parents. That is 
‘a matter of familiar and ordinary observation. We 
notice the same thing occurring in the cases of the 
‘domestic animals—dogs, for instance, and their 
offspring. In all these cases of propagation and 
perpetuation, there seems to be a tendency in the 
offspring to take the characters of the parental 
“organisms. 'T'o that tendency a special name is given 
—and as I may very often use it, I will write it 
