

II THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 81 



tail, the jaws, separately or all together, and, as 

 Spallanzani showed long ago, these parts not only 

 grow 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 

 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 

 beings, the formative impulse is tending the one 

 scheme which the Archseus 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 phse- 

 nomena of vitality are not something apart from 

 other physical phenomena, but one with them ; 



