of myriads of these infinitesimal influences that his happi-
ness or misery depends.

Still more clearly seen is this inter-weaving of personal
interests with social interests, when we discover how essen-
tially vital is the connection between each person and the
society of which he is a unit. We commonly enough com-
pare a nation to a living organism. We speak of "the body
politic," of the functions of its parts, of its growth, and of its
diseases, as though it were a creature. But we usually em-
ploy these expressions as metaphors, little suspecting how
close is the analogy, and how far it will bear carrying out.
So completely, however, is a society organized on the same
system as an individual being, that we may perceive some-
thing more than analogy between them. Let us look at a
few of the facts.

Observe, first, that the parallel becomes far clearer when
we learn that the body of any ordinary animal is itself com-
pounded of innumerable microscopic organisms, which possess
a kind of independent vitality, which grow by imbibing nutri-
ment from the circulating fluids, and which multiply, as the
infusorial monads do, by spontaneous fission. The whole pro-
cess of development, beginning with the first change in the
ovum and ending with the production of an adult creature, is
fundamentally a perpetual increase in the number of these
cells by the mode of fissiparous generation. On the other
hand, that gradual decay witnessed in old age, is in essence a
cessation of this increase. During health, the vitality of
these cells is subordinated to that of the system at large;
and the presence of insubordinate cells implies disease. Thus,
in the human being, small-pox arises from the intrusion of
a species of cell foreign to that community of cells of which
the body consists; -- a cell which, absorbing nourishment from
the blood, rapidly multiplies by spontaneous division, until
its progeny have diffused themselves throughout the tissues;
and if the excreting energies of the system fail to get rid of

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