But in arguing from the existence of parallelism in the inorganic world to its possibility in the organic world, we are less liable to displease the mechanists than those other extremists, the neo-vitalists, who will be prone to deny all parity between living, and inanimate, matter. Fortunately, we are in a position to appease the scruples of the latter by referring to the facts of _convergence_ as universally accepted evidence that the phenomenon of parallelism occurs in animate, no less than inanimate, nature. Admitting, therefore, that the laws of organic morphology are of a higher order than those which regulate atomic, molecular, and multimolecular structure, these facts attest, nevertheless, that parallelisms arise in organisms of separate ancestry which are due, not to heredity, but to the uniform action of universal morphogenetic forces. Hence general laws can be invoked to account for organic uniformities with the same right that they are invoked to account for resemblances existing between the various members of a chemical “family” like the Halogens. And why should this not be so? Organisms have much in common that transcends any possible scheme of evolution and that cannot be brought into alignment with the position arbitrarily assigned them in the evolutionary family-tree. They all originate as single cells. Their common means of growth and reproduction is mitotic cell division. This leads to the production of a _somatella_, among the protista, and of a _soma_ differentiated by histogenesis into two or three primary tissues, among the metista. All these fundamental processes are strikingly uniform throughout the entire plant and animal world. In these universal properties of living matter, therefore, we have a common basis for general structural and organizational laws, which, though irreducible to the “common ancestors” of Transformism, is quite adequate to account for both the homologies and analogies of living matter. Accept this basis of general laws regulating the development of living matter, and there is no difficulty in seeing why the problems posed by exposure to analogous environmental conditions are solved in parallel fashion by organisms, irrespective of whether they are nearly, or distantly, related in the sense of morphology. Transformism, on the other hand, can only account for homology at the expense of convergence, and for convergence at the expense of homology. So far as a common ancestral basis is concerned, the two kinds of resemblance are, from the very nature of the case, irreducible phenomena.