nnels through which is
transmitted the produce of many factories; and we believe that primarily
these factors were manufacturers who undertook to dispose of the produce
of smaller houses as well as their own, and ultimately became salesmen
only. Under a converse aspect, all the stages of this development have
been within these few years exemplified in our railway contractors.
There are sundry men now living who illustrate the whole process in
their own persons--men who were originally navvies, digging and
wheeling; who then undertook some small sub-contract, and worked along
with those they paid; who presently took larger contracts, and employed
foremen; and who now contract for whole railways, and let portions to
sub-contractors. That is to say, we have men who were originally
workers, but have finally become the main channels out of which diverge
secondary channels, which again bifurcate into the subordinate channels,
through which flows the money (representing the nutriment) supplied by
society to the actual makers of the railway. Now it seems worth
inquiring whether this is not the original course followed in the
evolution of secreting and excreting organs in an animal. We know that
such is the process by which the liver is developed. Out of the group of
bile-cells forming the germ of it, some centrally-placed ones, lying
next to the intestine, are transformed into ducts through which the
secretion of the peripheral bile-cells is poured into the intestine; and
as the peripheral bile-cells multiply, there similarly arise secondary
ducts emptying themselves into the main ones; tertiary ones into these;
and so on. Recent inquiries show that the like is the case with the
lungs,--that the bronchial tubes are thus formed. But while analogy
suggests that this is the _original_ mode in which such organs are
developed, it at the same time suggests that this does not necessarily
continue to be the mode. For as we find that in the social organism,
manufacturing establishments are no longer commonly developed through
the series of modifications above described, but now mostly arise by the
direct transformation of a number of persons into master, clerks,
foremen, workers, &c.; so the approximate method of forming organs, may
in some cases be replaced by a direct metamorphosis of the organic units
into the destined structure, without any transitional structures being
passed through. That there are organs thus formed is an ascertain