RELATION BETWEEN MINERALS, PLANTS, ETC. 27 
Plauts, 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 . y., 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.” u 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, while at another 
they appear to be as distinctly vegetable. 10 
CHAPTEK 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, 
