Certain other experiments point in the same direction.  Cut a hydra into equal halves and each half will form a complete animal.  The lower half forms a new top, with mouth and tentacles; the upper half, a new base.  Cut the other hydra a hair’s-breadth farther up.  The same layer of cells which in the first animal formed the lower exposed surface of the upper half now forms the upper exposed surface of the lower half.  And with this change of position it has changed its line of development; it will now give rise to a new upper half, not a base as before.  The same experiment can be tried on certain worms with similar results, only head and tail differ far more than top and base of hydra.  Difference in the position of cells has made vast difference in their line of development.  Now in both embryo and adult there must be some directing influence guiding these cells.  What is it?

An army is more than a mob of individuals; it is individuals plus organization, discipline, authority.  A republic is not square miles of territory and thousands or millions of inhabitants.  It is these plus organization, central government.  Webster claimed that the central government was, and had to be, before the states.  The organism cannot exist without its parts; it has a very real existence in and through them.  It can coerce them.  The state may be an abstraction, but it is one against which it is usually fatal to rebel, and which can say to a citizen, Go and be hanged, and he straightway mounts the scaffold.  Now these are analogies and prove nothing.  But in so far as they throw light on the essential idea of an organism, they may aid us in gaining a right view of our “cell republic.”

Says Whitman in a very interesting article on the “Inadequacy of the Cell-Theory”:  “That organization precedes cell-formation and regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a conclusion that forces itself upon us from many sides.”  “The structure which we see in a cell-mosaic is something superadded to organization, not itself the foundation of organization.  Comparative embryology reminds us at every turn that the organism dominates cell-formation, using for the same purpose one, several, or many cells, massing its material and directing its movements, and shaping its organs as if cells did not exist, or as if they existed only in complete subordination to its will, if I may so speak.  The organization of the egg is carried forward to the adult as an unbroken physiological unity, or individuality, through all modifications and transformations.”  And Wilson, Whitman, Hertwig, and others urge “that the organism as a whole controls the formative processes going on in each part” of the embryo.  And many years ago Huxley wrote, “They (the cells) are no more the producers of the vital phenomena than the shells scattered along the sea-beach are the instruments by which the gravitative force of the moon acts upon the ocean.  Like these, the cells mark only where the vital tides have been, and how they have acted."[A]