SENSATIONS OF INSECTS. 107 



cult it is to draw the line which separates animals and 

 vegetables, though every one supposes that he knows such a 

 line, and admits into the pale of his sympathy all that lies on 

 one side of it, whilst he entirely excludes all that lies on the 

 other. Bishop Watson, in the fifth volume of that delightful 

 work, which should be a model for popular writers on scientific 

 subjects, his Essays on Chemistry, has shewn in a lively man- 

 ner the extent of this difficulty. The late President of the 

 Linnagan Society, Sir J. E. Smith, has also stated it in his 

 Introduction to Botany. The presence or absence of a 

 stomach, he observes, will not suffice to establish a distinction, 

 for the polypus may be turned inside out, like a glove, and left 

 in this state without any derangement of its functions. The 

 power of locomotion is not an universal criterion, as many 

 vegetables seem to possess it in a higher degree than the 

 corals and corallines. In short, it has cost philosophers more 

 trouble than is generally imagined, to give a definition of what 

 is an animal. Sir J. Smith tells us that the only definition to 

 which he had hitherto found no exception, is that of M. Mirbel, 

 given in his Treatise of Vegetable Anatomy, that " plants 

 alone have a power of deriving nourishment, though indeed 

 not exclusively, from inorganic matter, mere earths, salts, or 

 airs, substances certainly incapable of serving as food for any 

 animals, the latter only feeding on what is or has been orga- 

 nized matter, either of a vegetable or animal nature. So that 

 it should seem to be the office of vegetable life alone to trans- 

 form dead matter into organized living bodies." 



Admitting then, that the line can be drawn which separates 

 animals from vegetables, I contend that another line should be 

 drawn, almost as broad, which separates animals from each 

 other. This line will be found at the point where there ceases 

 to exist in animals a unity of being. In man, we are all aware, 

 there exists this unity. There is nothing that a man is more 

 conscious of to himself than his own identity. He knows that 

 he cannot be in two places at one time, that he has a continued, 

 uninterrupted existence, and that whatever acts he performs 

 cannot be ascribed to another. The soul is immaterial and 

 indivisible, but the body is not. Accordingly, if the body be 

 separated into two parts, and life remain at all, it remains only 

 in one and not in the other. One only of them can con- 

 stitute the man, otherwise he would lose his identity. This 



