4 The Chemical Statics of Organised Beings. 



suits, that animals do not create true organic matters, but that 

 they destroy them; that plants, on the contrary, habitually create 

 these same matters, and that they destroy but few of them, and 

 that in order to effectuate particular and determinate conditions. 



Thus it is in the vegetable kingdom that the great laboratory of 

 organic life resides; there it is that the vegetable and animal mat- 

 ters are formed, and they are there produced at the cost of the air : 



From vegetables, these matters pass ready-formed into the 

 herbivorous animals, which destroy a portion of them, and ac- 

 cumulate the remainder in their tissues : 



From herbivorous animals, they pass ready-formed into the 

 carnivorous animals, who destroy or retain some of them ac- 

 cording to their wants : 



Lastly, during the life of these animals, or after their death, 

 these organic matters, as they are destroyed, return to the atmo- 

 sphere whence they proceeded. 



Thus closes this mysterious circle of organic life at the sur- 

 face of the globe. The air contains or engenders oxidised pro- 

 ducts, as carbonic acid, water, nitric acid, oxide of ammonium. 

 Plants, constituting true reducing apparatus, possess themselves 

 of their radicals, carbon, hydrogen, azote, ammonium. With 

 these radicals they form all the organic or organisable matters 

 which they yield to animals. These, forming, in their turn, true 

 apparatus for combustion, reproduce carbonic acid, water, oxide 

 of ammonium, and nitric acid, which return to the air to pro- 

 duce anew and through endless ages the same phenomena. 



And if we add to this picture, already, from its simplicity and 

 its grandeur, so striking, the indisputable function of the solar 

 light, which alone has the power of putting in motion this im- 

 mense apparatus, this apparatus never yet imitated, consti- 

 tuted of the vegetable kingdom, and in which is accomplished 

 the reduction of the oxidised products of air, we shall be 

 struck with the import of these words of Lavoisier: — 



" Organisation, sensation, spontaneous movement, life, exist 

 only at the surface of the earth, and in places exposed to the 

 light. It would seem that the fable of the torch of Prometheus 

 was the expression of a philosophic truth which had not escaped 

 the ancients. Without light, nature was without life, was dead 

 and inanimate : by the gift of light, a beneficent God spread 

 upon the surface of the earth organisation, feeling, and thought." 



These words are as true as they are beautiful. If feeling and 

 thought, if the noblest faculties of the soul and of the intellect, 

 have need, for their manifestation, of a material covering, to 

 plants is assigned the framing of its web with the elements which 

 they borrow from the air, and under the influence of the light 

 which the sun, its inexhaustible source, pours in unceasing floods 

 upon the surface of the globe. 



