group together and form one body, dividing the labour between them, the result is something stupendous. There are animals composed in this way, some of whose cells have developed their digestive capabilities to such an extent that they have almost lost all their others. These are carefully guarded in the interior of the body. Other cells in this same beast, receiving their food in a fluid form from these digestive specialists, secrete lime around them till a skeleton is built up. To the levers of this skeleton are attached bundles and strands of cells, which, if they can do nothing else, can lengthen and shorten and make it move. Yet, again, there are cells which have especial facilities for receiving, weighing, and transmitting chemical and physical promptings. These cells, again, lie in a protected corner of the interior, but they send out fine threads to one another and every part of the body, and control the whole.
The animal in which this beautiful system of division of labour has been carried to its greatest perfection has many and varied powers. He can in some cases even apply to the individuals of the species the principles of his own cellular economy, and thereby achieve not only the making of poetry and jokes, but the building of a Westminster Abbey, the construction of Maxim guns, and the enforcing of his economic refinements upon his less highly specialized neighbours.
We have now traced out a general idea of life. We have seen that its basis rests upon a chemical structure which, to maintain its identity, must be always changing. We have seen that to do this it must keep breaking down its substance, and giving off the products, and taking hold of extraneous materials, and building them in, not only to repair the loss, but in order to grow; and that to do that it has to be more or less modified in parts, in order that the main bulk may be brought within reach of its food, and be then able to convert it into the most useful form. And, lastly, we have seen that just as several specialized forms of plasm together make up a cell, so several kinds of cells, each with some peculiarity exaggerated, aggregate, and, supplying one another’s needs, compose a body.
