THE PAST CONDITION OF ORGANIC 

 NATURE 



IN the lecture which I delivered last Monday evening, 

 I endeavoured to sketch in a very brief manner, but as 

 well as the time at my disposal would permit, the present 

 condition of organic nature, meaning by that large title 

 simply an indication of the great, broad, and general 

 principles which are to be discovered by those who look 

 attentively at the phenomena of organic nature as at 

 present displayed. The general result of our investigations 

 might be summed up thus : we found that the multiplicity 

 of the forms of animal life, great as that may be, may 

 be reduced to a comparatively few primitive plans or 

 types of construction ; that a further study of the develop- 

 ment of those different forms revealed to us that they 

 were again reducible, until we at last brought the infinite 

 diversity of animal, and even vegetable life, down to the 

 primordial form of a single cell. 



We found that our analysis of the organic world, whether 

 animals or plants, showed, in the long run, that they might 

 both be reduced into, and were, in fact, composed of the 

 same constituents. And we saw that the plant obtained 

 the materials constituting its substance by a peculiar 

 combination of matters belonging entirely to the inorganic 

 world ; that, then, the animal was constantly appro- 

 priating the nitrogenous matters of the plant to its own 

 nourishment, and returning them back to the inorganic 

 world, in what we spoke of as its waste ; and that, finally, 

 when the animal ceased to exist, the constituents of its 

 body were dissolved and transmitted to that inorganic 

 world whence they had been at first abstracted. Thus we 

 saw in both the blade of grass and the horse but the same 

 elements differently combined and arranged. We dis- 

 covered a continual circulation going on, the plant 

 drawing in the elements of inorganic nature and combining 

 them into food for the animal creation ; the animal borrow- 



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