CYTOLOGY. 137 



or restoration. So a negative, fighting, col- 

 liding world dawns far down among these 

 micro-organisms of cell-life. 



Perchance the chief interest here is to ob- 

 serve the faint reflex, the far-off forecast, as 

 it were, of human association, of man form- 

 ing his social institutions. Each individual 

 person strives to become a member of a 

 greater organism which integrates him with 

 his fellow-man in state and society, as the cell 

 pushes for union with its fellow-cell in the 

 animal body. Stages of the same great pro- 

 cess of evolution we may deem both these 

 facts, though they be very different rungs of 

 the one colossal ladder, rising from Nature to 

 Mind, a veritable Jacob 's-ladder from Earth 

 to Heaven. The cell is already in its way in- 

 stitutional, and builds its world of institu- 

 tional order, which has its control, its author- 

 ity, its law, its constitution. It may be said 

 that our human organism, if it be true to that 

 deepest principle of itself which made it an 

 organism, cannot stop in its career of organ- 

 ization, but must organize itself with others of 

 its like. The cell is, therefore, in its supreme 

 aspect, associative, and keeps generating as- 

 sociation in its round of life, being the bearer 

 of the same not only through the lapse of 

 time, but up the many-graded steps of evolu- 

 tion. We may say that it shows the aspira- 



