ii.] THE PLANT AND THE ANIMAL 107 



so that ultimately the vegetable nourishes the animal. 

 True, this law allows of many exceptions among vegetables. 

 We do not hesitate to class amongst vegetables the Drosera, 

 the Dionaea, the Pinguicula, which are insectivorous 

 plants. On the other hand, the fungi, which occupy so 

 considerable a place in the vegetable world, feed like ani- 

 mals : whether they are ferments, saprophytes or parasites, 

 it is to already formed organic substances that they owe 

 their nourishment. It is therefore impossible to draw from 

 this difference any static definition such as would auto- 

 matically settle in any particular case the question whether 

 we are dealing with a plant or an animal. But the difference 

 may provide the beginning of a dynamic definition of the 

 two kingdoms, in that it marks the two divergent di- 

 rections in which vegetables and animals have taken their 

 course. It is a remarkable fact that the fungi, which 

 nature has spread all over the earth in such extraordinary 

 profusion, have not been able to evolve. Organically 

 they do not rise above tissues which, in the higher vegetables, 

 are formed in the embryonic sac of the ovary, and precede 

 the germinative development of the new individual. 1 

 They might be called the abortive children of the vege- 

 table world. Their different species are like so many blind 

 alleys, as if, by renouncing the mode of alimentation custom- 

 ary amongst vegetables, they had been brought to a stand- 

 still on the highway of vegetable evolution. As to the 

 Drosera, the Dionaea, and insectivorous plants in general, 

 they are fed by their roots, like other plants; they too fix, 

 by their green parts, the carbon of the carbonic acid in the 

 atmosphere. Their faculty of capturing, absorbing and 

 digesting insects must have arisen late, in quite exceptional 

 cases where the soil was too poor to furnish sufficient nour- 

 ishment. In a general way, then, if we attach less im- 



1 De Saporta and Marion, L'Evolulion des cryptogames, 1881, p. 37. 



