THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



insects by the male egg, and ten by the female, be- 

 cause the female needs twice as much food as the 

 male. There are many cases like that, of seeing 

 behind the veil of things in the insect world, and 

 one can but marvel at it. It sometimes seems as if 

 human beings possessed this gift in a tentative, ru- 

 dimentary kind of way. 



How can any one help but marvel when he con- 

 siders the structure of his own body? — several 

 millions or billions of minute cells, working together 

 like little people to build it up and maintain it, 

 dividing themselves into communities or fraternities 

 each with its own work to do, and, so far as we can 

 see, with none having the direction of the whole 

 work — no head or superintendent or architect to 

 determine what the finished structure shall be. One 

 community of cells builds muscle, one nerves, 

 another bones, another hair, skin, and nails, others 

 the viscera, the brain, and so on, till the full stature 

 of man is reached. No single cell or group of cells 

 knows the plan or the end to which they are all 

 working. What puts the result of all these myriad 

 workmen together and makes the man? They are 

 many, he is one. The microscope reveals them; it 

 cannot reveal him. He rises from the world of 

 minute plastic interacting forms as Venus rose from 

 the sea, and the sea knows not the secret. 



The great king said, "I am the state"; but think 

 of the multiplex lives of all of his subjects that made 

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