ment, both in health and disease, is emphatically a government "of
the cells, by the cells, for the cells." At first these cell-units were
regarded simply as geographic sections, as it were, sub-divisions of the
tissues, bearing much the same relation to the whole body as the bricks
of the wall do to the building, or, from a little broader view, as the
Hessians of a given regiment to the entire army. They were merely the
creatures of the organism as a whole, its servants who lived but to obey
its commands and carry out its purposes, directed in purely arbitrary
and despotic fashion by the lordly brain and nerve-ganglia, which again
are directed by the mind, and that again by a still higher power. In
fact, they were regarded as, so to speak, individuals without
personality, mere slaves and helots under the ganglion-oligarchy which
was controlled by the tyrant mind, and he but the mouthpiece of one of
the Olympians. But time has changed all that, and already the triumphs
of democracy have been as signal in biology as they have been in
politics, and far more rapid. The sturdy little citizen-cells have
steadily but surely fought their way to recognition as the controlling
power of the entire body-politic, have forced the ganglion-oligarchy to
admit that they are but delegates, and even the tyrant mind to concede
that he rules by their sufferance alone. His power is mainly a veto, and
even that may be overruled by the usual two-thirds vote.

In fact, if we dared to presume to criticise this magnificent theory of
disease, we would simply say that it is not "cellular" enough, that it
hardly as yet sufficiently recognizes the individuality, the
independence, the power of initiative, of the single constituent cell.
It is still a little too apt to assume, because a cell has donned a
uniform and fallen into line with thousands of its fellows to form a
tissue in most respects of somewhat lower rank than that originally
possessed by it in its free condition, that it has therefore surrendered
all of its rights and become a mere thing, a lever or a cog in the great
machine. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I firmly believe
that our clearest insight into and firmest grasp upon the problems of
pathology will come from a recognition of the fact that, no matter how
stereotyped, or toil-worn, or even degraded, the individual cells of any
tissue may have become, they still retain most of the rights and
privileges which they origi