t, petrified and mummified as
they have become, they are still emphatically alive, and upon the
preservation of a fair degree of vigor in them depends entirely the
strength and resisting power of the mass in which they are embedded, and
of which they form scarcely a third. Destroy the vitality of its cells,
and the rock-like bone will waste away before the attack of the
body-fluids like soft sandstone under the elements. Shatter it, or twist
it out of place, and it will promptly repair itself, and to a remarkable
degree resume its original directions and proportions.

So little is this form of change inconsistent with the preservation of
individualism, that we actually find outside of the body an exactly
similar process, occurring in individual and independent animals, in the
familiar drama of coral-building. The coral polyp saturates itself with
the lime-salts of the sea-water, much as the bone-corpuscles with those
of the blood and lymph, and thus protects itself in life and becomes the
flying buttress of a continent in death.

In the familiar connective-tissue, or "binding-stuff," we find a process
similar in kind but differing in the degree, so to speak, of its
degradation.

The quivering responsiveness of the protoplasm of the am[oe]boid
ancestral cell has transformed itself into tough, stringy bands and webs
for the purpose of binding together the more delicate tissues of the
body. It has retained more of its rights and privileges, and
consequently possesses a greater amount of both biological and
pathological initiative. In many respects purely mechanical in its
function, fastening the muscles to the bones, the bones to each other,
giving toughness to the great skin-sheet, and swinging in hammock-like
mesh the precious brain-cell or potent liver-lobule, it still possesses
and exercises for the benefit of the body considerable powers of
discretion and aggressive vital action. Through its activity chiefly is
carried out that miracle of human physiology, the process of repair. By
the transformation of its protoplasm the surplus food-materials of the
times of plenty are stored away within its cell-wall against the time of
stress.

Whatever emergency may arise, nature, whatever other forces she may be
unable to send to the rescue, can always depend upon the
connective-tissues to meet it; and, of course, as everywhere the medal
of honor has its reverse side, their power for evil is as distinguished
as their power