709 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[March 11,1871. 
time the ciliary motion ceases, and then the hud 
settles down, and begins to extend itself into fila¬ 
ments, and thus becomes a plant like that from 
which it proceeded. 
This is not the result of a true generative process, 
as the seed is ; it is more like a bud. There are va¬ 
rious plants that throw off buds by the process that 
we call gemmation ; and this is a process of gemma¬ 
tion or budding, not a process of true sexual genera¬ 
tion. The Vauclieria was observed in the last cen¬ 
tury by Vaucher, and he ascribed this power of mo¬ 
tion to animal life, and considered that here was a 
curious passage from vegetable to animal, and then 
back again from animal to vegetable. That, how¬ 
ever, we now understand not to be the case. This 
ciliary motion is not a phenomenon at all peculiar 
to animals: there is no question that a very large 
number of bodies that have been described as ani¬ 
malcules are truly plants, and the tendency now is 
continually to carry into the Vegetable kingdom ad¬ 
ditional tribes of these bodies that have been called 
animalcules, rather than to extend the Animal king¬ 
dom to comprehend those new and varied forms that 
are continually being discovered. 
You may ask me what is the difference between 
an Animal and a Plant, and we may well stop a mo¬ 
ment to notice what I believe to be the true physio¬ 
logical distinction between them; namely, that the 
Animal is essentially dependent upon previous plant 
life for its nutrition, having no power of living upon 
the elementary substances contained in the air, the 
water, or the soil. It has no power to combine these 
with itself, but is dependent entirely on organic com¬ 
pounds which have been previously prepared and 
combined by the plant. On the other hand, that the 
Plant has the power, especially, and indeed almost 
solely, under the influence of light, of decomposing 
the carbonic acid of the air, of uniting the carbon 
which it obtains from the air with the oxygen and 
hydrogen of water, and also of decomposing the am¬ 
monia of the air and of the soil (for the air always 
contains a small quantity of ammonia), and of 
uniting the nitrogen of that ammonia with the oxy¬ 
gen, hydrogen and carbon that it obtains from the 
air and water, to form nitrogenous compounds. Thus 
the plant is continually manufacturing, so to speak, 
these compounds, and the animal is continually de¬ 
stroying them, and returning them to the inorganic 
kingdom, because the whole life of the animal is one 
of decomposition. The animal is constantly giving 
back to the mineral kingdom—in the carbonic acid of 
respiration, and in the production of urea and similar 
compounds in the urine, which decompose into car¬ 
bonate of ammonia—the very same component ele¬ 
ments which it has obtained from the vegetable king¬ 
dom, and which the vegetable has taken from the 
mineral. Tins is represented here in a circular dia¬ 
gram, where you see the Vegetable kingdom drawing 
its materials from the Mineral kingdom, combining 
them into organic compounds, and then imparting 
them to the Animal kingdom, which in its turn from < 
the decompositions which are always going on in its : 
body, returns them to the Mineral kingdom. That < 
is the physiological.distinction, and that, I believe, is i 
the only one on which we can rest with any degree i 
of satisfaction; and even this does not always hold < 
good, for there is one veiy limited tribe of plants, 
which a chemist would say ought really to be placed ■ 
in the animal kingdom, and yet the resemblance to ! 
undoubted vegetables is so close that it would be a : 
. breach of all natural arrangement to separate them. 
I allude to the group of Fungi. None of you would 
i feel that there was a fitness in describing a mush¬ 
room as an animal, and yet as regards nutrition it is 
an animal. The group of fungi is a group living 
upon organic compounds previously prepared, and 
light is not essential to them ; many thrive best in 
darkness. In fact, in the common mushroom it is 
only the fructification, the upward extension of a 
growth that is taking place under ground, that ap¬ 
pears above the soil. The real nutritive life hi the 
mushroom is performed beneath the ground ; what it 
pushes up is simply the fructification. In the early 
stage of the mushroom—what is known as the mush¬ 
room spawn, when it is laid down to produce the 
mushroom—the growth of what is called a byssus, a 
long filamentous growth, takes place best in dark¬ 
ness. In old cellars where vine lias been laid down a 
long time, there is often a most extraordinary fungous 
growth; and underneath paving-stones, again, there 
is often a fungous growth, which has been known to 
lift up the stones; and all that takes place in dark¬ 
ness. There is no question that fungi as a rule 
thrive best in darkness up to the time when they put 
forth their fructification, and that they appropriate, 
and have a most peculiar power of appropriating, de¬ 
composing organic matter, supplied either by the vege¬ 
table or the animal kingdom. You all know the ap¬ 
pearance of the growth of mould, which often takes 
place on preserves, on chemical preparations, ex¬ 
tracts, and so forth; and the mould that produces 
the blueness of Stilton cheese. All these cases show 
you the readiness with which mould developes itself 
on substances which are either decaying or ready to 
decay. And this mould, produced from germs of 
fungi sown as it were upon such substances, helps 
their decay. This is a very important and very in¬ 
teresting point, upon which I wish to fix your atten¬ 
tion for a few minutes, viz. this peculiar habit of the 
fungi, and the changes to which it leads. We have 
heard a great deal lately about disease germs, but I 
venture to say that Professor Tyndall’s lecture, al¬ 
though extremely interesting, and although present¬ 
ing to the eye, and, so to speak, demonstrating their 
presence by the beam of electric light which he was 
able to send through an atmosphere containing such 
germs, really added nothing to the knowledge pre¬ 
viously possessed by naturalists, because we all knew 
perfectly well that the air is loaded with these germs 
of fimgi. If you take a puff-ball and press it be¬ 
tween your finger and thumb, you will see the fine 
dust that issues forth, and which is carried by the 
winds into eveiy quarter; for a puff-ball consists of a 
number of germs or sporules which is really scarcely 
capable of being expressed in figures. If we mea¬ 
sure these, and then consider the size of the whole 
mass of a large puff-ball, with reference to the size 
of any one of these minute particles, we can form an 
approximate calculation of the number of particles 
contained in it, and it is something almost incon¬ 
ceivable by any effort of our imagination, and almost 
incapable of being expressed in figures, like the great 
distances of the stars. Tlius you see that these par¬ 
ticles must be continually being diffused through the 
atmosphere in every direction. That is onty one 
case out of multitudes. 
Now, with regard to the demonstration of this uni¬ 
versal diffusion, many years ago a friend of mine in 
Bristol made the following experiment, which I 
mentioned to Dr. Tyndall, and which he was very 
