in the plant is made by a molecular change, we are not now surprised to learn that starchgrains of animal origin have been found. We cannot conceive any thing more characteristic of a vegetable than chlorophyll, the green of herbage; for in it the special work of the plant is done, namely, the transformation of mineral matter into organic, under the light of the sun, this being the prerogative of vegetation. Now, not only does chlorophyll abound in many ambiguous microscopical organisms of fresh and salt water, which except for this would be taken for animals, but it has recently been detected in hydras and sea-anemones and planarias, which are as certainly animals as are oysters and clams. Nor can it be thought that they possess something merely resembling chlorophyll; for it performs the characteristic work of that peculiar substance, which, as I have said, is the characteristic work of vegetation. For the index and essential accompaniment of this work (ie., of the conversion of mineral into organic matter) is the evolution of oxygen gas from the decomposition of carbonic acid, water, &c., in which, if in any thing, vegetation consists. Now, the proof that what these animals. possess is chlorophyll itself is demonstrated

by their performance of the same function. They decompose carbonic acid and evolve oxygen gas, just as a green leaf does. Moreover, the chlorophyll has been extracted and identified by the spectroscopic test. Here, then, animals, undoubted animals, in addition to their own proper functions, take on the essential function of plants. There is no avoiding the conclusion that such animals are doing the duty of vegetables.

Although I make little account of it, I should not overlook a more empirical distinction between the two kingdoms which has also failed. The characteristic features of an animal were mouth and stomach. This is the normal correlation of an animal with its conditions. Having to feed on vegetable matter, or what has been vegetable matter, in solid as well as liquid form, a mouth opening into an internal cavity of some sort was the natural pattern, to which all animals were supposed to conform. Nature, with all her fondness for patterns, will not be arbitrarily held to them. Entozoa feed like rhizophytes; and turbellarias and their relatives have no alimentary canal, the food taken by what answers to mouth passing as directly into the general tissue as does the

But

material which a parasitic root imbibes from its host, or an ordinary root from the soil.

While animals are thus overpassing the boundary in one direction, vegetables are mak-. ing reprisals on the other. The rule is, that vegetables create organic matter, and animals consume it, producing none. But, while some animals produce some organic matter, some plants even among those of the highest grade feed wholly upon other plants, or even upon animals or their products. Like animals, some are herbivorous and some are carnivorous. That certain plants live parasitically upon other plants or upon animals, has long been too familiar to be remarkable. But that plants of the highest grade could capture or in some way take possession of small animals, extract and feed upon their juices, and appropriate these as nourishment, is essentially a recent wonder and a recently ascertained fact. Yet some of the facts which point to this conclusion are old enough; and the conclusion would probably have been reached years ago, except for the preconception that plants and animals were too distinct for interchange of functions. Now that we know they are not, and that the living structure in the two is fundamentally identi

And

cal, what were formerly regarded as freaks of Nature are no longer mere wonderments, but parts of a system, and capable of being correlated with the rest by investigation. investigation soon ascertained that this carnivorous attachment to the vegetable organism in Dionara and Drosera was an organ for digesting as well as capturing animal food. Juices are imbibed by it directly, as in animals from the stomach; and nourishing solid parts are rendered soluble and assimilable by imbuing them with peptones or digestive ferments, analogous in composition and in action to the gastric juice of the higher animals.

Perhaps nothing in Nature can be more wonderful than all this; and nothing is more characteristic of the change which has come over scientific mind in our day than the manner in which such a discovery is received. The leading facts were well known a hundred years ago, and more. But, until recently, these phenomena were regarded as altogether anomalous; and such anomalies appear to have troubled nobody, except the framers of definitions. "Lusus nature" was a convenient phrase, and stood in the place of explanation, -as if the play of Nature was something apart from her work.

20

NATURAL science and religioN.

No one seems to have had any difficulty in believing that a few particular plants were endowed with faculties of which no other plants were sharers. The thoughtful naturalist of our day is in a different frame of mind. He expects to find that the extraordinary is only an extreme case of the ordinary; and he looks for instances leading up from the one to the other. I cannot tarry to explain how this expectation has directed observation and stimulated research in this particular field, and reached the result that these wonderful plants are distinguished only by higher degrees and more prominent manifestations of a power which is in some sort common to many or to all their brethren. We learn, even, that the germinating embryo of a grain of corn feeds upon and digests the solid maternal nourishment which surrounds it, and the humblest mould appropriates the organic matter which it attacks, by the aid of a peptone or inversive ferment, not different in nature and office from the gastric and other juices by aid of which we appropriate our daily meals.

It does appear also that the lowest organisms, which live a kind of scavenger life, by using over again dead or effete organic matter running to decay- but to some of which living

juices come not amiss- have also the power, certain salts being given, of creating organic matter, and building up a fabric without sunlight and without chlorophyll. Here, then, is the simplest organic life, in which, germs being given, i. e. first individuals of the sort supplied and placed in favorable surroundings, they increase and multiply into more, each to multiply again, and so on, in geometrical progression. From such lowly basis the two kingdoms may be conceived to rise, diverging as they ascend in separate lines, the one developing close relations with sunlight and becoming the food-producing vegetable realm; the other, the food-consuming animal realm, which, dispensed from the labor of assimilation, and from the fixity of position which generally attends it, may rise to higher and freer manifestations of life. Such, at least, appear to be the relations of the two kingdoms to each other and to their common base; and such is the conception through which we may attain to an explanation of how it may be that members of each line possess so many characteristics of the other.

. I have said, "germs being given," the forms increase and multiply. If asked, Whence the