Can we imagine immaterial faculties which matter may utterly subjugate whose exercise a grain of opium can prevent? Is not the communication of motion to matter an unexplored abyss whose difficulties have been rather displaced than resolved by Newton’s system? Motion is a _great soul_ whose alliance with matter is quite as difficult to explain as is the production of thought in man.—BALZAC, _Louis Lambert_. (Translated by Harriett Green Courtis.) THE HUMAN CELL. BY ARTHUR A. BEALE, M. B. “To demonstrate that Brotherhood is a fact in Nature; to investigate the laws of Nature and the divine powers in Man.” When we fall away from the path of duty, when torn by the storms of passion we forget that there reposes within the complexities of our nature a divine spark—much more, perhaps, that we ourselves are a universe, nay, a universe of Universes, a Great Eternal God, controlling, energizing and creating worlds that live and have their day and cease to be. But it is so. Hour by hour worlds are falling away and with them ebb the vital forces of our being. Take a flake of scurf from the head and put it under the microscope,—a new vista is opened up. And yet, this is only a type of millions of like or dissimilar entities, which are so bound together as to compose the mighty universe of man’s body,—the least important of his constitution. These little lives take different shapes to suit different necessities, but they agree in certain essential features which we learn to call _the cell_. And looking lower still this cell is of the same type as those found in the animals and again in the plants. How very little difference, too, between these and the monads of the mineral kingdom! But keeping to man, these cells form themselves into societies, which we call tissues, these into others we call organs, and the organs form together a corporate organization, the body, which in a healthy state is subservient to the synthesizing forces emanating from the Heart, where lives the source of life, the divine Ruler. So the organs work together in harmony. If any organ begins to absorb more attention and life than is due to it, not only does it suffer itself, but brings discord into the whole. But as long as it observes its own duty and fulfils its place, so does it maintain its own status, and receive its own benefits; for thus, and thus alone, can it participate in the higher impulse, that comes from that sacred centre. As of the organs so of the cells of which each is composed, they must act in accordance with the unified impulse of the organ, but so must each cell be true to the heart of its own tiny body—whence, as I shall try to show, comes the true impulse, by which it evolves,—that centre where are played the divine harmonies and where stands the God directing his forces in the building of “the temple not made with hands.”