400 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 



up a Hydra^ permeate the juices absorbed from the food. 

 There is no apparatus for elaborating a concentrated and 

 purified nutriment, and distributing it among the compo- 

 nent units ; but these component units directly imbibe the 

 unprepared nutriment, either from the digestive cavity or 

 from each other. May we not say that this is what takes 

 place in an aboriginal tribe ? All its members severally 

 obtain for themselves the necessaries of life in their crude 

 states ; and severally prepare them for their owti uses as 

 well as they can. When there arises a decided difierentia- 

 tion between the governing and the governed, some 

 amount of transfer begins between those inferior indi- 

 viduals, who, as workers, come directly in contact with the 

 products of the earth, and those superior ones who exer- 

 cise the higher functions — a transfer parallel to that which 

 accompanies the differentiation of the ectoderm from the 

 endoderm. In t]#e one case, as in the other, however, it 

 is a transfer of products that are little if at all prepared ; 

 and takes place directly from the unit which obtains to 

 the unit which consumes, without entering into any general 

 current. 



Passing to larger organisms — individual and social — we 

 find the first advance upon this arrangement. Where, as 

 among the compound Hydrozoa^ there is an aggregation 

 of many such primitive groups as form HydrcB ; or where, 

 as in a Medusa^ one of these groups has become of great 

 size ; there exist rude channels running throughout the 

 substance of the body : not however, channels for the con- 

 veyance of prepared nutriment, but mere prolongations of 

 the digestive cavity, through which the crude chyle-aque- 

 ous fluid reaches the remoter parts, and is moved back- 

 wards and forwards by the creature's contractions. Do we 

 not find in some of the more advanced primitive communi- 

 ties, an analogous condition ? When the men, partially or 

 fully united into one society, become numerous — when, as 



