394 BIOLOGY. 



2277. In the hairs the nutritive system is prolonged 

 above the body. 



2278. The hairs and scales are the general terrestrial 

 system of the body determined by the air. 



2279. Thus the earth has sprung up into a plant. 

 Scales and hairs are like true vegetable leaves, which still 

 continue their process in the animal ; they can no longer 

 it is true make their respiratory process hold good for 

 the animal process itself, but are at present content 

 with only oxydizing the material of evaporation. It is 

 properly the integument only, not the entire body, which 

 respires through hairs and scales. 



2280. The hairs are dried branchial filaments, and 

 therefore continue to occupy in Man, those situations 

 only where in the lower animals branchiae or tentacula 

 are placed. Around e. g. the mouth, upon the head, under 

 the arms or in the axillae, and around the sexual aper- 

 tures. 



2281. The feathers are dried ramified branchiae, pin- 

 nate leaves. 



2282. The hairs participate in the electric process of 

 the whole body. 



2283. What determines the colour in the plant, de- 

 termines it also in the animal ; only in the plant the 

 colour is more coarsely precipitated, and nothing there- 

 fore glimmers from the interior of the body, but all 

 is green. In an animal, however, the colouring matter 

 is transparent, and the interior is thus rendered visible. 



2284. With the external coverings, such as scales, and 

 lastly with the hairs, all organs of the trunk, in so far as 

 they are derived from what is vegetable, are exhausted. 

 The vegetable animal, as trunk, is completed, and we 

 must now therefore turn to the sexual organs. 



4. SEXUAL ORGANS. 



2285. The sexual organs are developments of the 

 integument upon a higher grade, and combinations of 

 the same with the animal systems, like as the blossom is 

 a repetition of all vegetative systems. 



