RELATION BETWEEN MINERALS, PLANTS, ETC. 27 
the ultimate fibrillae, as that which produces the sensible 
motions of plants. The ciliary movements of animalcules 
and of microscopic plants are precisely similar, and in 
neither case indicate consciousness or self- determining 
power. 
Plants, as well as animals, need a season of repose. 
Both have their epidemics. On both, narcotic and acrid 
poisons produce analogous results. Both have circulatory 
systems. Are some animals warm-blooded? In germi- 
nation and flowering, plants evolve heat—the stamens of 
the Arum, é. g., showing a rise of 20°. In a sense, an Oak 
has just as much heat as an Elephant, only the miserly 
tree locks up the sunlight in solid carbon. 
At present, any boundary of the Animal Kingdom is 
arbitrary. “ Probably life is essentially the same in the 
two kingdoms; and to vegetable life, faculties are super- 
added in the lower animals, some of which are, here and 
there, not indistinctly foreshadowed in plants.” ‘“ It must 
be said that there are organisms which at one period of 
their life exhibit an aggregate of phenomena such as to 
justify us in speaking of them as animals, while at another 
they appear to be as distinctly vegetable.” 
CHAPTER III. 
RELATION BETWEEN MINERALS, PLANTS, AND ANIMALS. 
THERE are no independent members of creation: all 
things touch upon one another. The matter of the living 
world is identical with that of the inorganic. The plant, 
feeding on the minerals, carbonic acid, water, and am- 
monia, builds them up into complex, organic compounds, 
as starch, sugar, gum, cellulose, albumen, fibrine, caseiue, 
