SOCIETY AN ORGANISM. 5 



tributing agencies are acting ; that the controlling powers, govern- 

 ments, bureaus, judicial officers, police, must fail to keep order when 

 the necessaries of life are not supplied to them by the parts kept in 

 order we are obliged to say that this mutual dependence of parts is 

 similarly rigorous. Unlike as the two kinds of aggregates are in 

 sundry respects, they are alike in respect of this fundamental char- 

 acter, and the characters implied by it. 



How the combined actions of mutually-dependent parts constitute 

 life of the whole, and bow there hence results a parallelism between 

 national life and individual life, we see still more clearly on learning 

 that the life of every visible organism is constituted by the lives of 

 units too minute to be seen by the unaided eye. 



An undeniable illustration is furnished us by the strange order 

 Myxomycetes. The spores or germs produced by one of these forms 

 become ciliated monads which, after a time of active locomotion, 

 change into shapes like those of amoebae, move about, take in nu- 

 triment, grow, multiply by fission. Then these amceba-form indi- 

 viduals swarm together, begin to coalesce into groups, and these 

 groups to coalesce with one another, making a mass sometimes bare- 

 ly visible, sometimes as big as the hand. This plasmodium, irregu- 

 lar, mostly reticulated, and in substance gelatinous, itself exhibits 

 movements of its parts like those of a gigantic rhizopod, creeping 

 slowly over surfaces of decaying matters and even up the stems of 

 plants. Here, then, union of many minute living individuals to form 

 a relatively vast aggregate in which their individualities are appar- 

 ently lost, but the life of which results from combination of their 

 lives, is demonstrable. 



In other cases, instead of units which, originally discrete, lose 

 their individualities by aggregation, we have units which, arising by 

 multiplication from the same germ, do not part company, but never- 

 theless display their separate lives very clearly. A growing sponge 

 has its horny fibres clothed with a gelatinous substance, and the 

 microscope shows this to consist of moving monads. We cannot 

 deny life to the sponge as a whole, for it shows us some corporate 

 actions. The outer amoeba-form units partially lose their individuali- 

 ties by fusion into a protective layer or skin ; the supporting frame- 

 work of fibres is produced by the joint agency of the monads, and 

 from their joint agency also result those currents of water which are 

 drawn in through the small orifices and expelled through the larger. 

 But, while there is thus shown a feeble aggregate life, the lives of the 

 myriads of component units are very little subordinated : these units 

 form, as it were, a nation having scarcely any subdivision of func- 

 tions. Or, in the words of Prof. Huxley, " the sponge represents a 

 kind of subaqueous city, where the people are arranged about the 

 streets and roads in such a manner that each can easily appropriate 

 his food from the water as it passes along." 



