CHAPTER XXVII 



THE ANIMAL IN THE WORLD 



Our survey of zoology is drawing to a close. We began 

 with the discovery that an animal is an organism 

 Relations and with an attempt to realise what that fact 

 Beings" unity S means - We went on t0 examine a series of 

 of Life. such organisms and to investigate the modes 



in which they have come into being both as 

 individuals and as kinds of individuals. It remains for us 

 to study briefly the relations in which these beings stand 

 to other material things. The outstanding fact about an 

 animal is that it is alive. Animals, however, are not the 

 only things of which this is true. There are included 

 among living beings many other creatures, of which the 

 best known are the plants, though some cannot rightly be 

 said to belong either to the animal or to the vegetable 

 kingdom. We have now to find wherein lies the difference 

 between these kinds of organisms and between the kinds 

 of life which they exhibit. There is no fundamental 

 difference in the composition of the protoplasm which 

 is the essential part of all living things. Nor do they 

 differ in the essentials of their life. This may be seen by 

 comparing the activities of plants with those which we have 

 studied in animals. That the protoplasm of plants is 

 irritable we see in such cases as the turning of a sunflower 

 towards the sun, or the stimulation by gravity of the stem 

 to grow upward and the root downward, or the folding of 

 the leaves of the Sensitive Plant (Mimosa) when they are 

 touched. That it is automatic appears in such facts as the 

 slow turning of the tendrils of climbing plants till they 

 meet with objects to which they can cling. That it has 

 conductivity can be seen when a stimulus given to the leaf 



