120 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



go to find these bodies in organisms that have already 

 fixed them. They are two different ways of being in 

 dustrious, or perhaps we may prefer to say, of being idle. 

 For this very reason we doubt whether nervous elements, 

 however rudimentary, will ever be found in the plant. 

 What corresponds in it to the directing will of the 

 animal is, we believe, the direction in which it bends the 

 energy of the solar radiation when it uses it to break the 

 connection of the carbon with the oxygen in carbonic acid. 

 What corresponds in it to the sensibility of the animal is 

 the impressionability, quite of its kind, of its chlorophyl 

 to light. Now, a nervous system being pre-eminently 

 a mechanism which serves as intermediary between 

 sensations and volitions, the true &quot; nervous system &quot; of 

 the plant seems to be the mechanism or rather chemicism 

 sui generis which serves as intermediary between the im 

 pressionability of its chlorophyl to light and the produc 

 ing of starch : which amounts to saying that the plant can 

 have no nervous elements, and that the same impetus that 

 has led the animal to give itself nerves and nerve centres must 

 have ended, in the plant , in the chlorophyllian function. 1 



This first glance over the organized world will 

 enable us to ascertain more precisely what unites the 

 two kingdoms, and also what separates them. 



Suppose, as we suggested in the preceding chapter, 

 that at the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to 



1 Just as the plant, in certain cases, recovers the faculty of moving 

 actively which slumbers in it, so the animal, in exceptional circumstances, 

 can replace itself in the conditions of the vegetative life and develop in itself 

 an equivalent of the chlorophyllian function. It appears, indeed, from 

 recent experiments of Maria von Linden, that the chrysalides and the 

 caterpillars of certain Lepidoptera, under the influence of light, fix the 

 carbon of the carbonic acid contained in the atmosphere (M. von Linden, 

 &quot; L Assimilation de 1 acide carbonique par les chrysalides de L^pidopteres,&quot; 

 C.R. de la Soc. de biologif, 1905, pp. 691 ff.). 



