RELATION BETWEEN MINERALS, PLANTS, ETC. 27 



Plants, as well as animals, need a season of repose. 

 Both have their epidemics. On both, narcotic and acrid 

 poisons produce analogous results. Are some animals 

 warm-blooded? In germination and flowering, plants 

 evolve heat — the stamens of the Arum, e. g., showing a 

 rise of 20°. In a sense, an Oak has just as much heat as 

 an Elephant, only the miserly tree locks up the sunlight 

 in solid carbon. 



At present, any boundary of the Animal Kingdom is 

 arbitrary. " Probably life is essentially the same in the 

 two kingdoms ; and to vegetable life, faculties are super- 

 added in the lower animals, some of which are, here and 

 there, not indistinctly foreshadowed in plants." " It must 

 be said that there are organisms which at one period of 

 their life exhibit an aggregate of phenomena such as to 

 justify us in speaking of them as animals, w T hile at another 

 they appear to be as distinctly vegetable. 10 



CHAPTER III. 



RELATION BETWEEN MINERALS, PLANTS, AND ANIMALS. 



There are no independent members of creation : all 

 things touch upon one another. The matter of the living 

 world is identical with that of the inorganic. The plant, 

 feeding on the minerals, carbon dioxide, water, and am- 

 monia, builds them up into complex organic compounds, 

 as starch, sugar, gum, cellulose, albumen, fibrine, caseine, 

 and gluten. When the plant is eaten by the animal, these 

 substances are used for building up tissues, repairing 

 waste, laid up in reserve as glycogen and fat, or oxi- 

 dized in the blood to produce heat. The albuminoids are 

 essential for the formation of tissues, like muscle, nerve, 



