Bones, cartilages, muscles, nerves, and every tissue were traced to their origin in cell-growth. Man himself appears as a congeries of cells; his growth the expression of the sum of their growth; the vital processes of his body carried on by cell-action; secretion, absorption, exhalation, nutrition, chemical change, and vital change; so many names which only indicate phases in the history of cell-life, that epitome of all organic life. These splendid researches were the result of observations made with very imperfect and inoffensive instruments; they should encourage the poorest and simplest student of microscopic nature to think and to examine for himself. They should inspire an abiding faith in the noble simplicity of the innermost mysteries of nature, and the power of the human intellect to master the difficulties of all mere material problems in the exercise of its heaven-descended reason. Greatly should the microscopist rejoice to find in his favorite instrument a facile power of unveiling these high secrets.

The most inexpensive microscope gives -him the power to interrogate all surrounding objects on this head, and to draw from them the confession of their obedience to cell-power. Sitting in the poorest room, even on the dullest day, he may cut a chip from the floor, take a leaf from a flower, a thread from the carpet, a hair from the chair, a fragment from his food, a coal-chip from the fire, or a drop of blood from the finger, and they will all speak to him in this same language. Their variety will show up a higher uniformity, their complexity a simple cellular unit. Their multiform shapes will betray one common type. Uttering many voices, they sing one grace and canticle of the same purport; the vastness and variety of the results produced by modifications of the same unvarying means; the universality of cell-power; the pervading existence of cell-growth, the million development of its resources, its shapes, its functions, its labors, and its value.

* See Household Words, Volume the Eighth, pages 354 and 483.

This high law of unity stretches yet further. It has other applications, and has found other as illustrious exponents. While Schleiden and Schwann were working humbly in their vocation amid the mysteries of structure in far parts of Germany, our own countryman, Owen, was studying the law of form here in the heart of London. The one was busied with his microscope and his needles, searching into the tissues of plants, questioning their stem, their fibres, and their pollen; the other, arranging ill-smelling bones, dissecting neglected carcasses of wasted creatures, scorning nothing that once had life, and still possessed organization - making light of labor when it promised a new fact, or a fresh illustration - looking for order amidst confusion - waiting for light in the darkness. At either end of the web, patient workers were unravelling the plaited thread of science; each followed a widely separate clue, but in the end, as they held fast to the right, their paths have met, and they stand, centrally amidst the toiling, scattered crowd of scientific laborers, the apostles of a great truth.

What Schleiden had done for structural anatomy, Owen did for the anatomy of form. The man, the bird, the reptile, and the fish, the uncouth saurian, and the strange griffin of pre-Adamite times, seemed to be separated by as wide an interval as any that distinguished the structure of the lichen from that of the palm-tree. But, the secret once fathomed, and the type established, their visible connection is read off from them as from Nature's own primer. Owen has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the world, that, by changes of one form alone, the archetypal vertebra, all world-wide varieties have been effected. This is the key of the mammoth frame - it is the secret of the shape of the fishy tribe. Those are expanded vertebrae which inclose the brain of man; they are vertebral appendages which wall round his heart - which afford levers of action for the arms - which supply bases of support, and cavities of protection for the organs of motion and sense, so multiform and variously endowed. The paddle of the seal, the wing of the bird, and the fin of the fish are new forms of the same element.

Thus it is, that truth harmonizes with truth, and law combines with law.

This grand demonstration of unity in creation is a new bulwark to religion. The proofs of design have long been a potent weapon of defence, and an earnest source of delight in the hands of rational and religious men. But there were many things in nature which it failed to explain. What of intelligent and economic design could be traced in the half dozen bones hidden beneath the skin of the seal's flapper? Those joints were useless, and those pieces unavailing. A solid, single-hinged mass was apparently far more to the purpose than this difficult complexity of unused joints. We begin now to see that the apparent anomalies bear reference to economy of type, and not of instrument. They wear the livery of archetypal servitude, they are the servants of a double wisdom.

Thus, beyond and above the law of design in creation, stands the law of unity of type, and unity of structure. No function so various, no labor so rude, so elaborate, so dissimilar, but this cell can build up the instrument, and this model prescribes the limits of its shape. Through all creation, the microscope detects the handwriting of oneness of power and of ordinance. It has become the instrument of a new revelation in science, and speaks clearly to the soul as to the mind of man.