228 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [xn. 



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 plant ; the 

 acorn tends to build itself up again into a woodland giant such 

 {is 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 beings, the forma 

 tive impulse is tending the one scheme which the Archaeus of 

 the old speculators strives to carry out, seems 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 are not something apart from other physical phae- 

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

 the forces in each has a very similar tendency, their resultant, 

 the offspring, may reasonably be expected to deviate but little 

 from a course parallel to either, or to both. 



Represent the reason of the law to ourselves by what physical 

 metaphor or analogy we will, however, the great matter is to 

 apprehend its existence and the importance of the consequences 



