animal organism had nothing whatever to do but to put this food into the tissues, or to arrange for it to pass into the milk. But nature is not so wise and economical as was supposed at the Académie des Sciences. After a memorable debate, in which Dumas, Boussingault, Payen, Liebig, Persoz, Chossat, Milne-Edwards, and Flourens took part, and, later on, Berthelot and Claude Bernard, it was agreed that the animal does not grow fat from the fatty food which is supplied it, and that it makes its own fat just as the vegetable does, but in another manner. In the same way sugar, the normal constituent substance necessary for the nutrition of animals and plants, instead of being a vegetable product passing by alimentation from the herbivorous animals and thence to the carnivorous, is manufactured by the animal itself. Generally speaking, immediate principles have an equal claim to existence in the two kingdoms. Both form and destroy the substances indispensable to life.
Here, then, one of the barriers between animal life and vegetable life is overthrown and destroyed.
Unity of Digestive Acts in Animals and Plants.—Similarly, another barrier falls if we show that digestion, long considered the exclusive function of animals, and, in particular, of the higher animals, is in reality universal.
Cuvier pointed out the absence of a digestive apparatus as a very general and distinctive characteristic of plants. But the absence of a digestive apparatus does not necessarily imply the absence of digestion. The essential act of digestion is independent of the infinite variety of the organs, just as a reaction is independent of the form of the vessel in
