THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 209 



of Milo only to a certain degree; or, with less 

 vandalism, I do not break it up, but light up its 

 inner structure to some extent by a sort of Bontgen- 

 ray apparatus. And suppose I found that this one 

 aesthetic individuality is made up of millions of 

 much smaller and aesthetically finer and more unified 

 images. I do not mean of millions of repetitions 

 of the large Venus in miniature, but of real and 

 unmistakable little works of art, each of which, 

 regarded separately and without any injury to its 

 narrower individuality, might be just as excellent 

 a subject for aesthetic examination as the whole 

 Venus. 



This is, of course, nonsense as regards the Venus 

 of Milo. There is nothing of the kind in it. I 

 have given the paradoxical supposition merely for 

 the purpose of showing what we really find in the 

 case of the turtle. 



When the organic individual turtle is closely 

 studied it breaks up first into so many simpler 

 organic individuals, which undoubtedly belong as 

 such to the province of organic morphology. They 

 are the cells. The theory of Schleiden, Schwann, 

 and Virchow here comes into direct touch with 

 morphology. Every higher animal or plant has 

 its own individuality ; and within this individuality 

 there is a conglomerate, a community, or a state, of 

 individuals of a lower order, that have their own 

 life and their corresponding individual life-form. 

 Man himself, the highest of animals, is a cell-state. 

 So Virchow taught. Each one of us is an in- 

 lividual, and as such an object of morphology. 



U 



