Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/444

428, we trace out the gradual development of the more complex animal forms, we see coming forward into greater and greater prominence the arrangement of the tissues in definite ways to secure mechanical ends. Thus the entire body acquires particular shapes, and parts of the body are built up into mechanisms, the actions of which are to the advantage of the individual. Into the composition of these mechanisms, or "organs," the active, fundamental tissues, as well as the passive or indifferent tissues, enter; and the working of each mechanism, the function of each organ is dependent partly on the mechanical conditions offered by the passive elements, partly on the activity of the active elements. The vascular mechanism, of which we have just spoken, is such a mechanism. Similarly, the urgent necessity for the access of oxygen to all parts of the body has given rise to a complicated respiratory mechanism; and the needs of copious alimentation, to an alimentary or digestive mechanism.

Further, inasmuch as muscular movement is one of the chief ends, or the most important means to the chief ends of animal life, we find the animal body abounding in motor mechanisms, in which the prime mover is muscular contraction, while the machinery is supplied by complicated arrangements of muscles with such indifferent tissues as bone, cartilage, and tendon. In fact, the greater part of the animal body is a collection of muscular machines, some serving for locomotion, others for special manœuvres of particular members and parts, others as an assistance to the senses, and yet others for the production of voice, and, in man, of speech.

Lastly, the simple automatism of the amœba, with its simple responses to external stimuli, is replaced in the higher animals by an exceedingly complex volition, affected in multitudinous ways by influences from the world without; and there is a correspondingly complex central nervous system. And here we meet with a new form of differentiation unknown elsewhere. While the contractility of the amœbal protoplasm differs at the most but slightly from the contractility of the vertebrate striated muscle, there is an enormous difference between the simple irritability of the amœba and the complex action of the vertebrate nervous system. Excepting the nervous or irritable tissues, the fundamental tissues have in all animals exactly the same properties, being, it is true, more acute and perfect in one than in another, but remaining fundamentally the same. The elementary muscular fibre of a mammal is at most a mass of but slightly differentiated protoplasm, forming a whole physiologically continuous, and in no way constituting a mechanism. Each fibre is a counterpart of all others; and the muscle of one animal differs from that of another in such particulars only as are wholly subordinate. In the nervous tissues of the higher animal, on the contrary, we find properties unknown to those of the lower ones; and, in proportion as we ascend the scale, we observe an increasing differentiation of the nervous