322 BIOLOGY. 



all the lower vegetable processes, is itself naught but the 

 aggregate of such processes repeated in the body of the 

 light ; thus the blossom, having been set free, is a vesicle 

 of ingestion endowed with all terrestrial functions. 



ANIMAL FORMATION. 



1770. The vegetable blossom loses its definition as 

 plant, so soon as it has acquired self- substantial life ; it 

 loses its definition, because as blossom, it simply lives in 

 light, while the plant must half dwell in darkness; it 

 loses it, because the copulating motion can be frequently 

 self-repeated. 



1771. The self-moveable or automatic blossom has con- 

 sequently passed over into a new kingdom, or into one 

 whose very definition is the self-substantial motion. 



1772. A blossom, which, when separated from the 

 stem, maintains by its own motion the galvanic process 

 or the life within itself, and gets its process of polariza- 

 tion, not from a body lying external to or coherent with 

 it (as is the vegetable stem) ; but only from itself such 

 blossom is an Animal. An animal is blossom without 

 stem or a flower, which of itself produces its stem, this 

 being the reverse of what takes place in the plant. The 

 essence of the animal consists in the maintenance through 

 its own motion of the galvanic vital process. It has been 

 already shown above, in speaking " quoad" the distinction 

 of the organic essences, that the exclusive or only valid 

 difference between plant and animal, was motion arising 

 in the latter apart from any external stimulus. We have 

 now been brought by quite another route to the same 

 result. 



1773; If the animal is the floral vesicle living from 

 or by itself, it can no longer lie fettered like the plant 

 between two elements ; it must be nominally free from 

 the chains of darkness, and thus from the earth. No 

 animal is so joined by growth with the earth, that like as 

 in a plant this should be a co-operating pole in its pro- 

 cesses. No animal must co-exist in two elements like 

 the plant, but it has all elements in itself, like the bios- 



