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 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;