EVIDENCE PKOVING THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 101 



the size, characteristic of the parental stock ; but even the 

 wonderful powers of reproducing lost parts possessed by 

 these animals are controlled by the same governing 

 tendency. Cut off the legs, the tail, the jaws, separately 

 or all together, and, as Spallanzani showed long ago, 

 these parts not only grow again, but the reintegrated 

 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. 1 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 re- 

 garded as a kind of monster. ... 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 neces- 

 sary 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 are not something 

 apart from other physical phenomena, but one with 

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

 one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless. 

 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 



1 This is evidence that the controlling of formation of molecules 

 to build up the organism is a centrifugal and not a centripetal 

 power. 



