Rev. P. Keith on the Conditiojis of Life. 127 



being of any other part. Cut or chop off any portion you 

 please from a block of marble, and the remaining portion shall 

 know nothing of it. In an organized body, every organ is use- 

 ful to every other organ, and no organ is made for the sake of 

 itself alone. Each sympathizes with all the rest, and each has 

 a common interest in the welfare of the whole. The aliment 

 which a plant or animal takes up it distributes to every member. 

 Manure and water the root of a plant, and the leaf and flower 

 will soon give indications that they participate in the benefit 

 conferred; lop it severely, and the branches will suffer. — Give 

 loan animal its due supply of food, and every organ is refreshed. 

 Cut or chop off from it a limb, or part of a limb, and you ex- 

 cite a sympathy throughout the whole fabric, with a feeling of 

 pain and of injury expressed by cries, or manifested by con- 

 tortions of body. 



Yet the limits separating the several kingdoms are not, in 

 all cases, conspicuously displayed. — Look at the lower orders 

 of vegetables — the algje, the fungi; and in some of them it is 

 with difficulty that you can discern even the faintest traces of 

 organization. A mere crust adhering to the surface of a rock, 

 as in the case of many of the lichens ; or a mere mass of jelly 

 covered with a fine epidermis, as in the case of many of the 

 tremellse, is all that you have for a plant. It is but little ele- 

 vated above the level of the mineral. — Look at the lower orders 

 of animals, and you find the same want of characteristic marks 

 among them. The organization of a polype seems to be but 

 little beyond that of a tremella : but its power of loco-motion, 

 which is evident, and its capability of sensation, which is pre- 

 sumptive, are tokens that indicate its superiority to the plant. 



As you advance to the higher orders of vegetables, the orga- 

 nization begins to be more complex, and the plant more perfect; 

 and thus you rise through the several orders till you reach the 

 highest and most perfect of all, producing root, stem, branch, 

 leaf, flower, and fruit, in the perfection of their kind, and giving 

 indications of organic and living function, and of the process 

 of internal nutrition, in the absorption, elaboration, transmis- 

 sion, and distribution of alimentary fluids in peculiar and ap- 

 propriate vessels. As you advance to the higher orders of 

 animals, the organization begins to be more complicated also, 

 and the animal more perfect, establishing the jjhysiological 

 maxim — that of all organized beings, whether plantsor animals, 

 the perfection of the individual is in tiie direct proportion of 

 the complexity of its organization. Hence the organization 

 of the animal is soon found to sur|)uss in complexity that 

 of the vegetable, liotli have a variety of organs in common — 

 tissues — the cellular, the lamellar, the vascular, tiie fibrous. 



Holh 



