92 NUTRITION. 



without divergence or modification ; while, as we ascend 

 in the scale, we are to recognize creatures more and more 

 dependent for their existence upon beings below them 

 which produce the food suitable for the subsistence of their 

 snperiors. Just as the inorganic and lifeless gradually leads 

 up to the organic, the living, and the mental, so such 

 authorities would have us believe, are gradations of perfec- 

 tion, to be demonstrated as regards the nutritive process. 

 From the stone that grows by the mere addition of matter 

 upon its surface, there is a transition to the complex 

 animal, the elements of whose food must be elaborated, 

 perhaps, many times by lower and simpler creatures before 

 the combinations suitable for the nutrition of their tissues 

 are produced. But this is fiction, and it is fiction of a most 

 unwarrantable kind, for the "facts" upon which all this 

 rests are themselves fictions of the imagination. It is not 

 true that some living things are nourished by inorganic 

 matter alone, while others can only be nourished by matter 

 which has been previously elaborated by living beings ; nor 

 is it true, in any way, that there is a gradation from the 

 lifeless to the living. The lowest, simplest organisms 

 require for their nutrition, besides inorganic material, a 

 certain appreciable proportion of matter which has already 

 lived ; while, on the other hand, man himself appropriates 

 water and mineral matters as well as elementary substances 

 like oxygen, and these are as necessary for the nutrition of 

 man's body as bread and meat. The chemist who regards 

 oxygen merely as a substance which combines with certain 

 constituents of the organism, as it combines with carbon 

 during combustion, cannot be acquainted with many 



