ii THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 113 



impossible to draw from this difference any static 

 definition such as would automatically settle in any 

 particular case the question whether we are deal 

 ing with a plant or an animal. But the difference may 

 provide the beginning of a dynamic definition of the 

 two kingdoms, in that it marks the two divergent 

 directions in which vegetables and animals have taken 

 their course. It is a remarkable fact that the fungi, 

 which nature has spread all over the earth in such 

 extraordinary profusion, have not been able to evolve. 

 Organically they do not rise above tissues which, in 

 the higher vegetables, are formed in the embryonic 

 sac of the ovary, and precede the germinative develop 

 ment of the new individual. 1 They might be called 

 the abortive children of the vegetable world. Their 

 different species are like so many blind alleys, as if, 

 by renouncing the mode of alimentation customary 

 amongst vegetables, they had been brought to a stand 

 still on the highway of vegetable evolution. As to 

 the Drosera, the Dionaea, and insectivorous plants 

 in general, they are fed by their roots, like other 

 plants ; they too fix, by their green parts, the carbon 

 of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere. Their faculty 

 of capturing, absorbing and digesting insects must 

 have arisen late, in quite exceptional cases where the 

 soil was too poor to furnish sufficient nourishment. 

 In a general way, then, if we attach less importance to 

 the presence of special characters than to their tendency 

 to develop, and if we regard as essential that tendency 

 along which evolution has been able to continue 

 indefinitely, we may say that vegetables are dis 

 tinguished from animals by their power of creating 

 organic matter out of mineral elements which they 



1 De Saporta and Marion, L Evolution des cryptogames, 1881, p. 37. 



I 



