DIGESTION IN THE ANIMAL SERIES. 231 



Annelids having a real intestine, lying free in the 

 general cavity, but only moderately, when at all, fur- 

 nished with secretory apparatus ; and so on, till at 

 length we reach the Mammalia, with their marvel- 

 lously complex digestive aj^paratus. Corresponding 

 with this increasing complexity of the organs is the 

 increasing complexity of the food which the animals 

 digest, from simple gases up to meat. 



If all were not so marvellous in Nature, would not 

 the marvellous fact that food itself exists, arrest us ? 

 Food is what the organism can separate from the 

 world around it, converting what it separates into its 

 own life. We may consider Life itself as an ever- 

 increasing identification with Nature. The simple cell, 

 from which the plant or animal arises, must draw light 

 and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surround- 

 ing world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, 

 although latent with life ; the grains in Egyptian 

 tombs, after lying thousands of years quiescent in 

 those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and then 

 smile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is 

 it not a perpetual absorption of Nature, the identifi- 

 cation of the individual with the universal ? And may 

 we not in speculative moods consider Death as the 

 grand impatience of the soul to free itself from the 



been advanced in this chapter, the reader may suspect that, inasmuch 

 as the polype has no mucous membrane whatever, the so-called stomach 

 not being anatomically distinguishable from the external skin, and 

 the process of digestion being wholly mechanical, the current opinion 

 is not proved by Trembley's experiment. 



