Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/665

 is now definitely constituted. Is not this the same law which presides over the transformation of savages into civilized people? Have not nations, corporations even, a consciousness and will? Do they not form great units which we designate by one word in current language?

The transformations we have followed step by step in the class of Polyps are not restricted to these animals. It is easy to show how



simple forms are again associated, in the group of Worms, to obtain the more complex forms. We find here the same laws as in studying the Polyps, Long ago, Van Beneden, Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, affirmed that each joint of a tape-worm (Fig. 11) was



the equivalent of a Trematode worm (Fig. 12); and Douve still earlier taught that the rings of a worm, or of an insect, were considered