for good. From their ranks are recruited a whole army of
those secessions from and rebellions against the body at large--the
tumors, from the treacherous and deadly sarcoma, or "soft cancer," to
the harmless fatty tumor, as well as the tubercle, the gumma of
syphilis, the interstitial fibrosis of Bright's disease. They are the
sturdy farmers and ever ready "minute-men" of the cell-republic, and we
find their prototype and parallel in the external world, both in
material structure and degree of vitality, in the well-known sponge and
its colonies.

Next in order, and, in fact, really forming a branch of the last, we
find the great group of storage-tissues, the granaries or bankers of the
body-politic, distinguished primarily, like the capitalist class
elsewhere, by an inordinate appetite, not to say greed. They sweep into
their interior all the food-materials which are not absolutely necessary
for the performance of the vital function of the other cells. These they
form first into protoplasm, and then by a simple degenerative process it
is transformed, "boiled down" as it were, into a yellow hydrocarbon
which is capable of storage for practically an indefinite period. Not a
very exalted function, and yet one of great importance to the welfare of
the entire body, for, like the Jews of the Middle Ages, the fat-cells,
possessing an extraordinary appetite for and faculty of acquiring
surplus wealth in times of plenty, can easily be robbed of it and
literally sucked dry in times of scarcity by any other body-cell which
happens to need it, especially by the belligerent military class of
muscle-cells. In fever or famine, fat is the first element of our
body-mass to disappear; so that Proudhon would seem to have some
biological basis for his demand for the _per capita_ division of the
fortunes of millionaires. And yet, rid the fat-cell of the weight of his
sordid gains, gaunt him down, as it were, like a hound for the
wolf-trail, and he becomes at once an active and aggressive member of
the binding-stuff group, ready for the repair of a wound or the barring
out of a tubercle-bacillus.

And this form of specialization has also its parallel outside of the
body in one of the classes in a community of Mexican ants, whose most
distinguishing feature is an enormously distended [oe]sophagus, capable
of containing nearly double the weight of the entire remainder of the
body. They are neither soldiers nor laborers, but accompany the latt