BEHAVIOR or WATER AMONG ORGANISMS 213 



The correspondences between vegetal and animal functioning and the 

 virtually autonomous work of moving water are too many and perhaps 

 too indefinite for enumeration; yet a fundamental likeness appears in a 

 circulatory mechanism so adapted as to adjust internal relations to ex- 

 ternal relations continuously, and eventually to reduce external conditions 

 to conformity with internal conditions. The organic functioning indeed 

 attains a higher order of autonomy, a more complex form of action, a 

 more continuous type of structures, and the coordinating attribute of 

 vitality ; yet it may be seriously questioned whether the differences are not 

 of degree rather than kind — and it may not be denied that the analogies 

 (or homologies, if the correspondences be regarded as such) arise chiefly 

 in the pulsatory property of water. 



It is significant that while the aggregate volume of the ontosphere (in- 

 cluding the H2O forming its major portion) is small, its efficiency in 

 modifying the earth face is disproportionately large : The rate of geologic 

 process on each part of every continent is largely controlled by the flora 

 and the soil which the floras of the ages have accumulated, while during 

 each eon the flora itself has been modified and started toward reconstruc- 

 tion by the fauna, as when the cryptogams of the Paleozoic were set on 

 the way to decadence by flower-seeking and pollen-bearing insects, when 

 fruit-bearing trees were placed in the lead by the help of seed-scattering 

 birds, and when man appeared to cultivate the innocuous and exterminate 

 the noxious among the fruits and grains and tubers. 



Considered in the planetary aspect, the functions of the ontosphere 

 merely raise to a higher plane the agency of the hydrosphere in regu- 

 lating terrestrial conditions and shaping terrestrial progress; and both 

 planes are parallel with those next higher, in which the attributes per- 

 taining to both merge in still more complete autonomy. In a broad waj-, 

 it is the function of the hydrosphere to propagate motion (molar and 

 molecular) and form structures, and the function of the ontosphere to 

 propagate both motions and structures; while the structures are distinct, 

 the laws of the motions have much in common, and the functions of both 

 spheres involve at least measurable self-activity and tend alike toward 

 self-perpetuity. 



THE FIELD OF BYDROQENT 



While terrestrial organisms are primarily dependent on the presence of 

 terrestrial HgO in such abundance as to be fairly free of inorganic chem- 

 ical and mechanical restraint, certain organisms at least produce (or re- 

 produce) H2O through their own vital processes: In assimilation by 

 higher animals, carbohydrates (for example, starch, cellulose, sugar, some 



