Here our ideas grow dim and confused. We human individuals unite to form certain higher communities. The word “social” reminds us of the fact: then we have the nation, the race, humanity. At least the earlier of these stages certainly perform various combined functions, and are understood to form, or wish to form, new individuals. We speak of the social organism, the body of the people, the soul of the people, and so on. We see that still more clearly in the case of the animals about us. Individuals, that correspond to our conception of an individual man, combine and form stocks and colonies, with division of labour. We find this in the medusæ, corals, anemones, tunicates, and vermalians. One of these animal stocks, to which our human social combinations only correspond in a much wider sense, gives us a stage that is represented by the tree in the plant-world. Infinite perspectives open out, and also infinite complications. Infinite problems spring up for morphology to deal with; it must make its way through the labyrinth of these complicated types of individualisation. The matter is still more intricate if I begin at the bottom of the biological series and proceed upwards. I, man, am an individual of a certain stage in my own collective activity. It is true that I am made up of millions of cell-individuals, but when we look at the whole these are merely elementary units. But take a being from the protist-world that is too lowly to be either animal or plant. In respect of its whole activity it is an individual just as much as I am, and therefore in this regard at the same stage as I. At the same time it consists of a single cell. The distinction in me between unit and whole does not exist in it. Its unit is the whole. It would seem a Sisyphean task to reduce all this to a system. Yet that is just what Haeckel has done. With crystalline clearness he separates and reunites and arranges everything, from the primitive organic individual, that is not yet a true cell—the monera he had himself discovered—upward. Organic morphology begins with them as its first object, the first complete individuality, the first “form.” All that lies below it is beyond the province of morphology. The last conceivable organic individuality is, perhaps, the atom; and that is not the concern of morphology. We start from the organic. Above the pre-cellular individuals and the true cells the next form-unities are the organs. Above the organs, after a few subtle intermediate stages, are the “persons.” Thus a new word is given to what we have hitherto conventionally called an “individual,” when we wanted to denote a turtle, a bird, a man, or an higher animal as a whole. To this corresponds in the plant the sprout. The stage above the “person” is the “stock.” We might also call it the social individual; in the plant-world it is the tree, in the coral the coral-stock, in the human case the social combination of a number of men for common action.