ORGANIC LIFE. 



of the nations of antiquity, the production of 

 plants and animals was always ascribed to these 

 forces ; the state of the surface of our planet, 

 when it was unoccupied by life, was even re- 

 ferred to the chaotic primeval ages of the con- 

 flicting elements. To the empirical domain of 

 objective sensuous consideration, to the delin- 

 eation of That which has become, or of the ac- 

 tual state and condition of our planet, the mys- 

 terious and unresolved problem of Things be- 

 coming does not rightfully belong. 



Our description of the world, abiding soberly 

 by reality, remains a stranger, not from timid- 

 ity, but from the nature of the subject and its 

 limits, to the obscure history of the beginning 

 of organized things(^^'') ; the word history being 

 here taken in its most usual acceptation. But 

 in our account of the actual Universe, we may 

 direct attention to the fact, that in the inorgan- 

 ic crust of the earth, the same elementary sub- 

 stances are present which enter into and com- 

 pose the organic frames of plants and animals. 

 We may say, that the same powers prevail in 

 these as in those, which combine and separate 

 bodies, which give consistency and fluidity in 

 the organic tissues : but, subjected to condi- 

 tions which, not yet fathomed, have been 

 systematically grouped according to analogies 

 more or less happily imagined, under the very 

 indefinite titles of effects of the vital force. It 

 is, therefore, felt as a want, in the frame of 

 mind which leads us to look on nature with a 

 contemplative eye, that we pursue the physical 

 phenomena which present themselves to us on 

 earth to their very farthest limits, to the evo- 

 ultion of vegetable forms, and the discovery 

 of that which in the organisms of animals is 

 endowed with self-motive force. In this way 

 does the geographical distribution of things or- 

 ganically-animated, i. e., plants and animals, 

 connect itself with the delineation of the inor- 

 ganic natural phenomena of the body of the 

 globe. 



Without pretending in this place to discuss 

 the difficult question of " the self-motive" in 

 animals, i. e., the difference between animal 

 and vegetable life, we must first direct atten- 

 tion to the circumstance that, were we endow- 

 ed by nature with a microscopic eye, and were 

 the integuments of plants completely transpa- 

 rent, the world of vegetation would not meet 

 us with that aspect of immobility and repose 

 in which it now presents itself to our senses. 

 The interiors of the cellular structures of vege- 

 tables are ceaselessly animated by the most di- 

 versified currents, rotatory, rising and falling, 

 dividing and ramifying, or altering their direc- 

 tion — as is made manifest by the movement of 

 the granular sap-corpuscles in the leaves of 

 several water-plants (Najades Characeae, Hy- 

 drocharideae), and in the hairs of phaneroga- 

 mous land-plants ; there is at the same time 

 seen a confused, molecular movement, first ob- 

 served by the distinguished botanist, Robert 

 Brown, but which also occurs among finely-di- 

 vided particles of matter of all kinds, the phe- 

 nomenon not taking place only within organic 

 cells ; the circular movement of the globules 

 of the cambium, in a system of special vessels 

 (cyclosis) ; lastly, the singular articulated fili- 

 form vessels of the anthers of the Chara and 

 the reproductive organs of the liverworts and 



sea-weeds which have the faculty of uncoiling 

 themselves, and in which Meyen, snatched too 

 soon away from science, believed that he rec- 

 ognized the analogues of the spermatozoa of 

 the animal creation. If to the multifarious ex- 

 citements and movements we add those that 

 belong to endosmose and the processes of nu- 

 trition and growth, and farther to the penetra- 

 tion [and exhalation] of air, we have a picture 

 of the forces which, almost unknown to us, are 

 active in the silent life of the vegetable world. 



Since I first portrayed the universal life of 

 the surface of the earth, and the distribution 

 of organic forms, both in the line of the height 

 and of the depth, in my " Views of Nature," 

 our knowledge in this direction also has been 

 surprisingly increased by Ehrenberg's brilliant 

 discoveries, " on the demeanor of minute life 

 in the ocean as well as in the ice of the polar 

 lands," discoveries made not by the way of in- 

 duction, but by that of simple accurate observa- 

 tion. The sphere of vitality, we might almost 

 say the horizon of life, has extended itself be- 

 fore our eyes. " There is not only an invisibly 

 small, or microscopical, incessantly active life 

 in the neighbourhood of both poles, where lar- 

 ger organisms are no longer produced ; but the 

 microscopical forms of life of the South Polar 

 Sea, collected in the Antarctic Voyage of Sir 

 James Ross, comprise a wonderful variety of en- 

 tirely new and often extremely beautiful forms. 

 Even in the remains of the liquefied round- 

 ed masses of ice that were picked up swim- 

 ming about under the latitude of 78° 10', more 

 than fifty species of silicious-shelled polygas- 

 trica, coscinodisca, with their green ovaries, 

 and consequently living and successfully strug- 

 gling with the extreme of severe cold, were 

 discovered. In the bay of the Erebus, in from 

 1242 to 1620 feet of water, sixty-eight silicious- 

 shelled polygastrica and phytolitharia, and with 

 them only a single calcareous-shelled polytha- 

 lamium, were drawn up by means of the lead. 



The oceanic microscopic forms have hitherto 

 been in vastly preponderating proportion of the 

 silicious-shelled kinds, although silica does not 

 appear among the constituents of sea-water dis- 

 covered by analysis, and the earth can only be 

 well conceived as mixed with or suspended in 

 the waters. The ocean, however, is not only 

 in particular spots, and in arms and bays, or 

 near the shore, thickly peopled with invisible, 

 i. e., by the unassisted eye, unseen living at- 

 oms ; it may be assumed, from the samples of 

 water drawn to the south of the Cape of Good 

 Hope, under 57° S. latitude, as well as from 

 the middle of the Atlantic, under the tropics, 

 by Schayer, in his return from Van Diemen's 

 Land, that in its ordinary state, without show-i 

 ing any particular colour, without being filled 

 with floating fragments of the silicious-shelled 

 filaments of the genus Chaetoceros, which so 

 much resemble the Oscillatoria of our fresh 

 waters, but when perfectly transparent to the 

 naked eye, the ocean still contains numerous 

 independent microscopical organisms. Sever- 

 al polygastrica from Cockburn Island, mixed 

 with the excrements of Penguins and sand, ap- 

 pear to be spread over the whole earth ; oth- 

 ers, again, are common to either pole(^"). 



From this (and all the more recent observa 

 tions confirm the view) it appears that in the 



