APPENDIX. 



A. — Animal Kingdom (p. 147). 



1. Distinctions leticeen Animals and Plants. — Since the discovery that the 

 spores (or seed-cells) of some Algae have locomotion like animalcules, and that 

 there are unicellular locomotive plants (the Diatoms, etc.), some have thought 

 that the two kingdoms of life blended together through their inferior species. 

 But the fact is that they are diverse throughout, — the opposite but mutually 

 dependent sides or parts of one system of life. The following are some of 

 their distinctions : — 



(1.) Plants excrete oxygen, a gas essential to animal life; animals excrete in 

 respiration carbonic acid, a gas essential to vegetable life. 



(2.) Plants take inorganic material as food, and turn it into organic ; animals 

 take this organic material thus prepared (plants), or other organic materials 

 made from it (animals), finding no nutriment in inorganic matter. 



(3.) Plants in passing from the unicellular state by growth lose in power, be- 

 coming usually fixed. Animals, in the same change, or in development from a 

 germ, increase in power, augmenting in muscular force, and also, in the case of 

 species above the lowest grade, in nervous force, — until an ant, for example, 

 becomes a one-ant power, a horse a one-horse power ; whence an animal is a self- 

 propagating piece of enginery of various power according to the species. 



(4.) The Vegetable kingdom is a provision for the storing away or magazining 

 of force for the Animal kingdom. This force is acquired through the sun's in- 

 fluence or forces acting on the plant, and so promoting growth ; mineral matter 

 is thereby carried up to a higher grade of composition, that of starch, vegetable 

 fibre, and sugar, and this is a state of concentrated or accumulated force. To 

 this stored force animals go in order to carry forward their development ; and, 

 moreover, the grade of composition thus rises still higher to muscle and nerve 

 (which contain nitrogen in addition to the constituents of the plant), and this is a 

 magazining of force in a still more concentrated or condensed state. There are 

 thus five states of stored force in nature, — three in inorganic, the solid, liquid, 

 and gaseous ; and two in organic, the vegetable and animal.* 



The Animal type differs from the Vegetable (though not all animals from 

 plants) in this : that, while the latter has the superior-and-inferior polarity of 

 simple growth, — the stem growing upward and the root downward, — the former 



* From a paper by the author on the " Anticipations of Man in Nature," published in the 

 New Englander, May, 1859. Professor John Le Conte presented similar views at a later date, 

 but independently, in a paper read before the American Association (in August, 1859). 



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