340 M. Dumas on the Chemical Statics of Organized Beings. 



animal matters are formed, and they are there produced at the 

 cost of the air : 



From vegetables, these matters pass ready-formed into the 

 herbivorous animals, which destroy a portion of them, and 

 accumulate the remainder in their tissues : 



From herbivorous animals, they pass ready-formed into 

 the carnivorous animals, who destroy or retain some of them 

 according to their wants: 



Lastly, during the life of these animals, or after their death, 

 these organic matters, as they are destroyed, return to the at- 

 mosphere whence they proceeded. 



Thus closes this mysterious circle of organic life at the sur- 

 face of the globe. The air contains or engenders oxidized pro- 

 ducts, as carbonic acid, water, nitric acid, oxide of ammo- 

 nium. Plants, constituting true reducing apparatus, possess 

 themselves of their radicals, carbon, hydrogen, azote, ammo- 

 nium. With these radicals they form all the organic or 

 organizable matters which they yield to animals. These, 

 forming, in their turn, true apparatus for combustion, repro- 

 duce carbonic acid, water, oxide of ammonium and nitric acid, 

 which return to the air to produce anew and through endless 

 ages the same phaenomena. 



And if we add to this picture, already, from its simplicity 

 and its grandeur, so striking, the indisputable function of the 

 solar light, which alone has the power of putting in motion 

 this immense apparatus, — this apparatus never yet imitated, 

 constituted of the vegetable kingdom, and in which is accom- 

 plished the reduction of'the oxidized products of air, — we shall 

 be struck with the import of these words of Lavoisier : — 



" Organization, sensation, spontaneous movement, life, ex- 

 ist only at the surface of the earth, and in places exposed to 

 the light. It would seem that the fable of the torch of Pro- 

 metheus was the expression of a philosophic truth which had 

 not escaped the ancients. Without light, nature was without 

 life, was dead and inanimate : by the gift of light, a bene- 

 ficent God spread upon the surface of the earth organization, 

 feeling and thought." 



These words are as true as they are beautiful. If feeling 

 and thought, if the noblest faculties of the soul and of the 

 intellect, have need, for their manifestation, of a material co- 

 vering, to plants is assigned the framing of its web with the 

 elements which they borrow from the air, and under the in- 

 fluence of the light which the sun, its inexhaustible source, 

 pours in unceasing floods upon the surface of the globe. 



And as if, in these great phenomena, all must be connected 

 with causes which appear the most distant from them, we must 



