276 The Distinction between Animals and Vegetables. . [May, 
no longer say, as does G. H. Lewes, in expounding Comte : 
“ That the physiologist could not create his science without 
the aid of chemistry lies in the very nature of physiology ; 
but the chemist can and does create chemistry without the 
aid of the physiologist.” The latter clause of this sentence 
is now manifest as an error. The causes of a number of 
important chemical phenomena are not merely organic but 
vital, and to understand them we must take vital aCtion into 
account. How many chemical reactions may be occasioned, 
or at least modified, by the interference of living microscopic 
organisms has yet to be traced out. 
But our objeCt is not to show the untrustworthiness of 
the Comtean, — or, indeed, of any linear classification of the 
sciences, — norevento discuss the chemical aCtion of microbia. 
This subject will in all probability soon have but too many 
expounders, and we shall have every change, chemical, 
physiological, pathological, perhaps even psychical, ascribed 
to “ germs.” We wish to call attention to a proposal 
recently made to base the distinction between animals and 
plants upon a chemical consideration. We know that all 
the characteristics upon which an abrupt boundary line 
between the two great organic kingdoms was founded in days 
by-gone have faded into indistinctness. 
We were, therefore, more surprised than edified to hear of 
the suggestion to which we refer. In a paper read before 
the Chemical Society, on February 5th, Professor E. 
Frankland defined plants as “ organisms performing synthe- 
tical functions, or such in which these functions are greatly 
predominant, animals as organisms performing analytical 
functions, or such in which these functions greatly pre- 
dominate.” On the strength of this single consideration, he 
ventured to refer the microbia, such as baCteria and bacilli, 
to the animal kingdom, inasmuch as their life “ essentially 
depends upon the taking asunder more or less complex 
compounds, resolving them into simpler compounds at the 
expense cf potential energy.” 
A-biological classification professedlyfoundeduponasingle 
antithetical distinction is rarely, if ever, happy, and seems to 
us, indeed, to be utterly unscientific. It the functions 
effected by bacilli are in all cases analytical rather than 
synthetic the correCt inference, as, at least, it seems to us, 
would be, not that they and their allies are animals, but 
rather that the alleged distinction is of no value, since it 
leads to a palpable error. 
* Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, by G. H. Lewes, p. 133. 
