ion; while
the noble class, ceasing to take any part in the processes of
alimentation, becomes devoted to the co-ordinated movements of the
entire body-politic.

Equally remarkable is a further analogy of like kind. After the mucous
and serous layers of the embryo have separated, there presently arises
between the two a third, known to physiologists as the vascular layer--a
layer out of which are developed the chief blood-vessels. The mucous
layer absorbs nutriment from the mass of yelk it encloses; this
nutriment has to be transferred to the overlying serous layer, out of
which the nervo-muscular system is being developed; and between the two
arises a vascular system by which the transfer is effected--a system of
vessels which continues ever after to be the transferrer of nutriment
from the places where it is absorbed and prepared, to the places where
it is needed for growth and repair. Well, may we not trace a parallel
step in social progress? Between the governing and the governed, there
at first exists no intermediate class; and even in some societies that
have reached considerable sizes, there are scarcely any but the nobles
and their kindred on the one hand, and the serfs on the other: the
social structure being such that transfer of commodities takes place
directly from slaves to their masters. But in societies of a higher
type, there grows up, between these two primitive classes, another--the
trading or middle class. Equally at first as now, we may see that,
speaking generally, this middle class is the analogue of the middle
layer in the embryo. For all traders are essentially distributors.
Whether they be wholesale dealers, who collect into large masses the
commodities of various producers; or whether they be retailers, who
divide out to those who want them, the masses of commodities thus
collected together; all mercantile men are agents of transfer from the
places where things are produced to the places where they are consumed.
Thus the distributing apparatus in a society, answers to the
distributing apparatus in a living body; not only in its functions, but
in its intermediate origin and subsequent position, and in the time of
its appearance.

Without enumerating the minor differentiations which these three great
classes afterwards undergo, we will merely note that throughout, they
follow the same general law with the differentiations of an individual
organism. In a society, as in a rudimentary animal, we h