Mr. Spencer'' s Social Anatomy. 69 



taining S3^stem is not all inside, as Mr. Spencer makes it, but 

 partly outside. It is outside before it is inside. The protozoon 

 is sustained by absorption through the surface, before stomach 

 cavity arises ; and a savage tribe is sustained by the external in- 

 dustries of fishing and hunting before manufactures arise. 



This criticism does not injure the parallel, but helps it. In this 

 external part of the sustaining system, we may also trace the an- 

 alogies between the animal and social structures. As the sustain- 

 ing system of the rhizopod is a mere surface folding around the 

 food coming in its way ; so the lowest savages merely absorb the 

 uncooked roots, berries and molluscs that chance brino-s them. 

 But with the beginnings of stomach come cilia to entrap and ab- 

 sorb food, and tentacles to range through the water at random and 

 capture prey ; so with the beginning of domestic life and the arts, 

 some men become hunters and fishers, the tentacles of the tribe 

 roving at random to entrap and capture game. With advance in 

 the animal, the external organs become fierce with appendages for 

 fighting; so advancing society produces its warrior class to win 

 sustenance by attack and plunder, — the claws and fangs of the 

 social body, growing more deadly as they become pointed with 

 bronze and steel. But as in the rising animal scale, fierce claws 

 at length give way to supple hands and cunning fingers, gathering 

 a better sustenance ; so in the social body, the military class in 

 time give place to the industrial, and what was once the claws of 

 the state become the productive hand of civilization, peacefully 

 gathering from field, forest, earth and sea a far richer sustenance 

 than war can steal. 



Again, one is forced to ask why Mr. Spencer has said nothing 

 of the respiratory system. Eespiration is the function most char- 

 acteristic of and most essential to animal life. The sustaining 

 and distributing systems of which he says so much are purely 

 vegetative, — belong to a tree as much as to a man. But one 

 of the chief differences separating the animal from the vegetable 

 is respiration. The animal absorbs oxygen, and the higher he is 

 in the scale, the more perfect his organs for absorbing it. In the 

 lowest animal the oxygen is absorbed from the water through the 

 general surface of the body ; then through specialized places on 



