SOME MOOT POINTS IN NATURAL HISTORY. 243 



to face, consists in the impossibility of drawing strict lines of 

 separation between groups of animals and of plants, the 

 identity of which, in former years, was regarded as being of 

 the most distinct and well-marked kind. 



The march of progress in natural science, moreover, 

 has not left untouched those grander distinctions which, as 

 ordinary observers, we are accustomed to regard as plainly 

 impressed on the face of living nature, and by means of 

 which we are enabled to separate the animal from the plant 

 If there is one feature in the common-sense knowledge of 

 everyday life upon the verity of w^hich we are accustomed 

 to pride ourselves, it is assuredly on that whereby we deem 

 ourselves competent to distinguish between the one great 

 group of living beings and the other. The child, in his first 

 lessons regarding the outer world, obtains a certain definite 

 knowledge of the objects which he sees around him, and 

 divides the objects into animals, plants, and minerals. In 

 each succeeding year of life, the classification of these early 

 days is placed on a firmer basis through the collective teach- 

 ings of experience, and the information acquired in child- 

 hood is taken throughout life as the guarantee of our ability 

 to distinguish perfectly, and as far as the exigencies of 

 everyday existence demand, between the animal and plant 

 creation. It might be thought, therefore, that distinctions 

 of ordinary life, apparently so plain and well-founded as 

 those just alluded to, would possess an equal rank and 

 value in the estimation of the man of science. For what 

 likelihood is there, it might be asked, of any one confusing 

 the bird with the tree amidst the foliage of which it builds 

 its nest, or the ox with the grass that it eats ? What 

 parallelism or similarity can be drawn or shown to exist 

 between the flower that decks the person of the beauty, and 

 the highest type of life which that fair one may be said to 

 personate? At first sight, indeed, the differences between 

 these contrasted living forms are so marked, and the points 

 of resemblance so few and insignificant, that, as might well 

 be urged, the mere fact of both sets of organisms being 



