1'i GENERAL ARRANGEMENT OF 



organic domain, will embrace, not the different animated or 

 vegetable forms themselves, as in a description of nature, 

 but rather their places in reference to the solid and liquid 

 parts of the earth's surface, or the geography of plants and 

 animals and the gradations of races and tribes distinguishable 

 in the specific unity of mankind. 



This division into two domains also belongs in a certain 

 degree to antiquity. A line of demarcation was drawn be- 

 tween the elementary processes, change of form and transi- 

 tion of substances into each other, on the one hand, and the 

 life of plants and animals on the other. The distinction 

 between plants and animals (in the entire absence of any 

 means of augmenting the visual powers) ( l ) was made to 

 rest either solely on intuitive apprehension, or on the dogma 

 of self-nourishment (Aristot. de Anima, ii. 1, T. i. p. 412, 

 a 14 Bekker), and internal impulse or volition leading to 

 motion. That kind of intellectual conception which I have 

 called intuitive apprehension, or rather intuition, and still 

 more, the Stagirite's own peculiar acuteness in the fruitful 

 combination of ideas, led him to discern the apparent transi- 

 tion from the inanimate to the animate, from the elementary 

 substance to the plant, and even to the view that, in the pro- 

 gressively higher processes of formation, there might be 

 found intermediate gradations from plants to the lower 

 kinds of animals. (Aristot. de part. Animal, iv. 5, p. 681, 

 a 12 ; and Hist. Animal, viii. 1, p. 588, a 4 Bekker). The 

 history of organic nature (taking the word history in its 

 primary signification, therefore in relation to earlier periods 

 of time, to the periods of the ancient Floras and Faunas) 

 is so intimately allied to geology, /. e. to the sequence of 

 the successive superimposed strata of the earth's surface, 



