202 The American Naturalist. [March, 



The cells of the body are used up, die, or are cast off, but 

 the man lives on. The individuals of a city perish here and 

 there and are buried, until in a few generations there is an 

 entirely new population, but the city, more or less changed, 

 still exists. The molecular interchange of the cells is identi- 

 cal with this, and while so far as time and general processes 

 are concerned then. 1 are differences, the operations of the 

 nation depend upon the organism function, this upon the cel- 

 lular, and the cellular upon the molecular. Nor are the activ- 

 ities so radically changed as we might imagine. The whole 

 end and aim, physically -peaking, is the conversion of mole- 

 cular into mass motion, death reversing the process. The 

 molecular life may be less than a minute; the cell life dura- 

 tion cover a few days or longer time ; man may live nearly a 

 century; the nation ten times as long or longer, but disinte- 

 gration in some form or other overtakes them all, and history 

 has to be studied in a new light to determine when the death 

 took place. 



The hermit crab is not the builder of the shell he lives in. 

 Egypt will someday be wholly occupied by Europeans, and so 

 in regarding the life of a city we may mistake the persistence 

 of a shell and overlook the fact that the social organism which 

 constituted the real city may have long since passed away. 



Sociologically, merchants, bankers, etc., are the nation's 

 intestinal or other visceral cells, and that they do not eat up 

 everything that passes into their custody is solely due to their 

 not being able to do so. 



Common carriers may be the blood-vessels. 



Telegraphs and other such means of communication consti- 

 tute the nervous system. 



Laborers, soldiers, are the muscle cells. 



So-called rulers and law-makers (whether in republic or 

 monarchy), merely obtain their power from the general units, 

 and serve to correlate the intestinal and vascular operations 

 as the sympathetic system does. 



The professors, authors, and other real thinkers generally 

 afford the unrecognized brains of communities, however starved 



