and a collective life, the life of the whole (vita communis). In the same way we must distinguish the elementary death, which is the cessation of the vital phenomena in the isolated cell, from the general death, which is the disappearance of the phenomena which characterised the collectivity, the totality, the federation, the nation, the city, the whole in so far as it is a unit.
These comparisons enable us to understand how general life depends on the partial lives of each anatomical citizen. If all die, the nation, the federation, the total being clearly ceases to exist. This city has an enormous population—there are thirty trillion cellules in the body of man; it is peopled with absolutely sedentary citizens, each of which has its fixed place, which it never leaves, and in which it lives and dies. It must possess a system of more or less perfect arrangements to secure the material life of each inhabitant. All have analogous requirements: they feed very much the same; they breathe in the same way; each in fact has its profession, industry, talents, and aptitudes by which it contributes to social life, and on which, in its turn, it depends. But the process of alimentation is the same for all. They must have water, nitrogenous materials and analogous ternaries; the same mineral substances, and the same vital gas, oxygen. It is no less necessary that the wastes and the egesta, very much alike in every respect, should be carried off and borne away in discharges arranged so as to free the whole system from the inconvenience, the unhealthiness, and the danger of these residues.
Secondary Organization in Organs.—That is why, as we said above, the secondary organizations of the
