772 
FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS. 
be that the victim becomes insensible to the strongest 
poisons, and that even strychnine may be introduced into 
the stomach with impunity. But, however curious and in¬ 
teresting this fact may be to the physiologist, we cannot see 
that any very practical results can be drawn from it, and we 
trust that the more humane physiologists who engage in the 
controversy may not be dazzled by the spurious brilliancy 
of such a discovery into the reprehensible practice of 
systematic torture of dumb animals.” 
Correlation of Physical and Vital Force. —The 
life of man, says Dr. Carpenter, in an article on the above 
subject, in the Quarterly Journal of Science, or of any of 
the higher animals, essentially consists in the manifestation 
of forces of various kinds, of which the organism is the 
instrument; and these forces are developed by the retrograde 
metamorphosis of the organic compounds generated by the 
instrumentality of the plant, whereby they ultimately return 
to the simple binary forms (water, carbonic acid, and 
ammonia) which serve as the essential food of vegetables. 
Of these organic compounds, one portion is converted into 
the substance of the living body, by a constructive force, 
which (in so far as it is not supplied by the direct agency of 
external heat) is developed by the metamorphosis of another 
portion of the food. And whilst the ultimate descent of the 
first-named portion to the simple condition from which it was 
originally drawn becomes one source of the peculiarly 
animal powers—the psychical and motor —exerted by the 
organism, another source of this may be found in a like* 
metamorphosis of a further portion of the food which has 
never been converted into living tissue. 
Thus, during the life of the animal, the organism is re¬ 
storing to the world around both the materials and the forces 
which it draws from it; and after its death this restoration is 
completed, as in plants, by the final decomposition of its 
substance. But there is this marked contrast between the 
two kingdoms of organic nature in their material and 
dynamical relations to the inorganic world—that whilst the 
vegetable is constantly engaged (so to speak) in raising its 
component materials from a lower plane to the higher by 
means of the power which it draws from the solar rays, the 
animal, whilst raising one portion of these to a higher level 
by the descent of another portion to a lower, ultimately lets 
down the whole of what the plant had raised; in so doing, 
however, giving back to the universe, in the form of heat 
and motion, the equivalent of the light and heat which the 
plants had taken from it. 
