1866. | On Cell Life. 235 
The problem would then be to calculate the length of the sides 
which represent the ages elapsed since the two families set out at 
the angular pomt in their progress down the two sides till they 
arrived at their present position at the end of each line. This line 
reduced to time I have no hesitation in affirming would represent 
not only thousands but tens of thousands of years. 
VII. ON CELL LIFE. 
By Dr. A. Frcx, Professor of Physiology and Zoology, 
Zurich University.* 
Pxato, the profoundest thinker of the ancients, has already com- 
pared the State with a human organism. The several organs of 
the body represented, according to his ideas, the different vocations 
of the citizens. 
Such conceptions, however fanciful they may seem, have never- 
theless invariably tended to advance politics; and again at the 
present time, the renowned lawyer Bluntschli is endeavouring 
means to secure for his system profounder deductions and 
reasoning. 
The comparison is really something more than a mere play of 
fancy, but it 1s better to illustrate the existence of the animal body 
by the State, than the existence of the State by the animal body. 
The points touched upon in the comparison are sufficiently apparent 
in the State, but in the animal body they are to a great extent 
concealed. ‘The comparison, too, is a more fruitful one for the 
physiologist than for the politician. This will be seen from the 
following remarks, whose aim is to render apparent some of the 
fundamental relations of the animal economy by means of the 
simile of the State. 
We do not assert that the State is comparable with an animal 
body ; but the converse, the body of one of the higher animals is 
comparable to a governed nation. If this expression has any real 
significance, it involves the supposition that the body of the higher 
animals is made up of individuals, which, like the individual persons 
of a nation ruled by the State, are in some respects entirely and 
essentially alike. This supposition has at first something so strange 
and startling in it, that I must at the outset seek to render it more 
familiar to my readers. 
What then can be these perfect individuals in the animal body ? 
The answer to this is easy: They are the cells. 
In order to show at once that Ido not stand alone in this view, 
* Translated from the German by HE. Ray Lankester. 
