of animals and societies, but
as it is also in those _lacunae_ in which the vascular system ends among
extensive families of inferior creatures.

Thus, then, we find between the distributing systems of living bodies
and the distributing systems of bodies-politic, wonderfully close
parallelisms. In the lowest forms of individual and social organisms,
there exist neither prepared nutritive matters nor distributing
appliances; and in both, these, arising as necessary accompaniments of
the differentiation of parts, approach perfection as this
differentiation approaches completeness. In animals, as in societies,
the distributing agencies begin to show themselves at the same relative
periods, and in the same relative positions. In the one, as in the
other, the nutritive materials circulated are at first crude and simple,
gradually become better elaborated and more heterogeneous, and have
eventually added to them a new element facilitating the nutritive
processes. The channels of communication pass through similar phases of
development, which bring them to analogous forms. And the directions,
rhythms, and rates of circulation, progress by like steps to like final
conditions.

* * * * *

We come at length to the nervous system. Having noticed the primary
differentiation of societies into the governing and governed classes,
and observed its analogy to the differentiation of the two primary
tissues which respectively develop into organs of external action and
organs of alimentation; having noticed some of the leading analogies
between the development of industrial arrangements and that of the
alimentary apparatus; and having, above, more fully traced the analogies
between the distributing systems, social and individual; we have now to
compare the appliances by which a society, as a whole, is regulated,
with those by which the movements of an individual creature are
regulated. We shall find here parallelisms equally striking with those
already detailed.

The class out of which governmental organization originates, is, as we
have said, analogous in its relations to the ectoderm of the lowest
animals and of embryonic forms. And as this primitive membrane, out of
which the nervo-muscular system is evolved, must, even in the first
stage of its differentiation, be slightly distinguished from the rest by
that greater impressibility and contractility characterizing the organs
to which it gives rise; s