What are Animals and Plants f 361 



jcasional visits to the hot-houses of our botanical gardens. 

 To these follow the almost numberless kinds of plants which 

 do not flower — the ferns, horse-tails, grasses, lichens, sea- 

 weeds (with their fresh-water allies), and fungi. Parallel 

 with the microscopic creatures ordinarily classed as ' animals ' 

 are the microscopic plants, some of which have been, till of 

 late years, the despair of the surgeon ; while others are now 

 recognised as, or suspected to be, the cause and origin of the 

 most painful and dangerous diseases. 



Multitudinous, however, as is the animal and vegetable 

 life which we have about us to-day, it is but a remnant of 

 that of which this planet has been the theatre ; and especi- 

 ally wonderful are the discoveries of fossil remains which 

 have been made in North America, revealing to us the past 

 existence of living forms such as had not been pictured even 

 in the recorded musings of any naturalist. Apart from such 

 wonderful scientific novelties, we have in the ancient chalk 

 cliffs, and the far more ancient coal-fields, abundant evidence 

 of the prodigality and duration of past vitality. The chalk 

 is, as it were, still in process of formation, as the ooze slowly 

 forming in the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. The coal affords 

 evidence that rich vegetable life flourished at a period so 

 remote that during it the first appearance of the chalk might 

 have seemed as the dream of an infinitely distant future. 



It is this immensely complex mass of living beings which 

 we have to regard, in their totality, as one whole, as well as 

 in their two component groups, if we would know what 

 * animals ' and ' plants ' really are. 



But in order that we may learn what they are, it will be 

 well first to advert briefly to one or two facts concerning 

 things which are neither plants nor animals, certain facts, 

 that is, about the ' inorganic world,' by which we mean the 

 solid earth with its two envelopes — water and air. All the 

 substances of which this inorganic world is composed are 



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