148 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, 

 with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation 

 to perfect his work. 



As life advances, and the young amphibian ranges the 

 waters, the terror of his insect contemporaries, not only are 

 the nutritious particles supplied by its prey, by the addition 

 of which to its frame growth takes place, laid down, each 

 in its proper spot, and in such due proportion to the 

 rest, as to reproduce the form, the colour, and the size, 

 characteristic of the parental stock ; but even the wonder- 

 ful 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 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 



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 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 two forces takes the direction of their 

 resultant. But living bodies mny be regarded as nothing 



