240 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS. 



creatures have to be retained in the earth itself in 

 the earth and to prepare and renew the soils in 

 which the otherwise exhausted ground may keep up 

 her continuous gifts of vegetation. Ages before Man 

 appeared with his tools of husbandry, these agricultur 

 ists of Nature in humid countries the Worm, in sub 

 tropical regions the White Ant ploughed and har 

 rowed the earth, so that without the Co-operations of 

 these most lowly forms of life, the higher beauty and 

 fruitfulness of the world had been impossible. The 

 very existence of animal life, to take another case of 

 broad economy, is possible only through the media 

 tion of the plant. No animal has the power to satisfy 

 one single impulse of hunger without the Co-operation 

 of the vegetable world. It is one of the mysteries of 

 organic chemistry that the Chlorophyll contained in 

 the green parts of plants, alone among substances, has 

 the power to break up the mineral kingdom and 

 utilize the products as food. Though detected re 

 cently in the tissues of two of the very lowest ani 

 mals, Chlorophyll is the peculiar possession of the 

 vegetable kingdom, and forms the solitary point of 

 contact between Man and all higher animals and their 

 supply of food. Every grain of matter therefore eaten 

 by Man, every movement of the body, every stroke of 

 work done by muscle or brain, depends upon the con 

 tribution of a plant, or of an animal which has eaten 

 a plant. Remove the vegetable kingdom, or interrupt 

 the flow of its unconscious benefactions, and the whole 

 higher life of the world ends. Everything, indeed, 

 came into being because of something else, and con 

 tinues to be because of its relations to something else. 

 The matter of the earth is built up of co-operating 



