n] BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS 65 



by a return to the third method, of aggregate 

 differentiation. How the method is now modified 

 owing to the possession of a highly-developed brain 

 by the units with which it works, will be treated of 

 in Chap. V : every age has known and wondered at 

 the results it has produced the communities of bees 

 and ants, and the societies of man himself. 



Enough has been said to give the stranger in 

 the land a general orientation, and to show him that 

 Life will guide him to a better view-point than Man 

 alone. The main outcome of the enquiry has been 

 to show that living matter at its first appearance 

 on earth, as the direct results of its material com- 

 position, could only express itself in the form of cells 

 rounded masses, microscopically small, each bound, 

 after attaining a limit of size, to divide into two 

 equal halves. Decreed thus by necessity at the outset, 

 these cells are used ever afterwards as the words out 

 of which all life's poems are fashioned. All living 

 things are made of cells and of structures built by 

 cells : all living action is reducible to cell-action. 

 And it was no hyperbole to say that the English 

 Nation is the direct descendant of an ancestor 

 which throughout its life remained a single cell. 



The cell was not from the outset an individual: 

 but by its fixed limits of size, its defined shape, and 

 its power of assimilation (by the combination of 

 these properties, be it understood, and not by any 



H. 5 



