ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 
11 
pression; the primary division of the whole kingdom of 
life is based upon the interpretation of this fact. Let us 
consider the plant world, the trees of the forest and the 
lilies of the field. They are clothed in a majesty and beauty 
before which the attainments of the animal kingdom pale. 
In the earliest life ages of the world, the days that geolo- 
gists have called the Proterozoic, the multicellular progeny 
of the earliest unicellular beings whose simplest beginnings 
we are slowly coming to know, determined through adapta- 
tion the entire subsequent course of life upon the earth. 
With our present understanding I believe it safe to say that 
the career of the life record on earth was laid down, “con- 
ceived in the lowest parts of the earth,” when some of these 
progeny found it to their material advantage to anchor 
themselves and to draw sustenance out of the soil or sea 
bottom where they stood, while to others fell the lot to seek, 
or being of more pronounced excitation and reaction, chose 
to seek their food from place to place. Those became de- 
pendent, the latter retained their independence; and there 
came the great cleft in the world of life, a cleft so deep and 
so enduring that time lias had no power to heal it. A great 
tree may well be of more service to the community than a 
man, some human derelict, but a tree will never become a 
man, nor anything else than a tree. In all the bewildering 
developments of the plant kingdom in which we find organs 
and fluids for the digestion of flesh, organs of special sense 
implying a nerve system that yields to and perhaps inter- 
prets the impacts of touch and of light, functions which 
have led undisciplined philosophers to the fancy that this 
apparent assumption of special functions indicates a refine- 
ment of anatomy which approaches the bridging of the 
abyss between plant and animal, the plant in its most im- 
pressive attainment still remains anchored and rooted, 
sometimes tossed about or floated by the waters but essen- 
tially devoid of independent motion. 
The significant fact, supported by the most tangible and 
