most philosophic to restrain a sigh for the needless suffering it entails, and a thrill of alarm for the dangers it gives our path, the darkness around us and ahead, the unimaginable end.
To the student, the end of the chapter is a chance to turn from the study of detail and allow his mind to range through a larger atmosphere and over a longer sequence. Closing our small chapter, we also may look at large over the great expanse of the biological series in whose illimitable panorama the war that covers our nearer skies with its blood-red cloud is no bigger than a pin point. As we contemplate in imagination the first minute spot of living jelly that crept and hungered in the mud, we can see the interplay of its necessities and its powers already pushing it along the path at the end of which we stand. Inherent in the dot of magic substance that was no longer mere carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a little phosphorus, was the capacity to combine with its fellows and to profit by the fellowship, however loose. In the slow process of time combination brought freedom which, just like ours, was freedom to vary and, varying, to specialize. So in time great States of cells grew up, their individual citizen cells specialized to the finest pitch, perfect in communion with one another, co-ordinate in all their activities, incorporated with the State.
These new and splendid organizations, by the very fact of giving freedom to the individual cells, had lost it themselves. Still, they retained their capacity for combination, and where the need of {212} freedom was greatest they found it again in a new combination on a bigger scale. Thus again was obtained freedom to vary, to specialize, to react. Over the world fellowships of all grades and almost all types of creatures sprang up. Specialization, communion, co-ordination again appeared on the new plane. It was as if Nature, to protect her children against herself, was trying to crowd as much living matter into one unit as she could. She had failed with her giant lizards, with the