Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/662

642 Following out his teleological argument, Cuvier remarks that the organization of this cavity and its appurtenances must needs vary-according to the nature of the aliment, and the operations which it has to undergo, before it can be converted into substances fitted for absorption; while the atmosphere and the earth supply plants with juices ready prepared, and which can be absorbed immediately.

As the animal body required to be independent of heat and of the atmosphere, there were no means by which the motion of its fluids could be produced by internal causes. Hence arose the second great distinctive character of animals, or the circulatory system, which is less important than the digestive, since it was unnecessary, and therefore is absent, in the more simple animals.

Animals further needed muscles for locomotion and nerves for sensibility. Hence, says Cuvier, it was necessary that the chemical composition of the animal body should be more complicated than that of the plant; and it is so, inasmuch as an additional substance, nitrogen, enters into it as an essential element, while in plants nitrogen is only accidentally joined with the three other fundamental constituents of organic beings—carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Indeed, he afterward affirms that nitrogen is peculiar to animals; and herein he places the third distinction between the animal and the plant.

The soil and the atmosphere supply plants with water, composed of hydrogen and oxygen; air, consisting of nitrogen and oxygen; and carbonic acid, containing carbon and oxygen. They retain the hydrogen and the carbon, exhale the superfluous oxygen, and absorb little or no nitrogen. The essential character of vegetable life is the exhalation of oxygen, which is effected through the agency of light.

Animals, on the contrary, derive their nourishment either directly or indirectly from plants. They get rid of the superfluous hydrogen and carbon, and accumulate nitrogen.

The relations of plants and animals to the atmosphere are therefore inverse. The plant withdraws water and carbonic acid from the atmosphere, the animal contributes both to it. Respiration that is, the absorption of oxygen, and the exhalation of carbonic acid—is the specially animal function of animals, and constitutes their fourth distinctive character.

Thus wrote Cuvier in 1828. But, in the fourth and fifth decades of this century, the greatest and most rapid revolution which biological science has ever undergone was effected by the application of the modern microscope to the investigation of organic structure; by the introduction of exact and easily manageable methods of conducting the chemical analysis of organic compounds; and, finally, by the employment of instruments of precision for the measurement of the physical forces which are at work in the living economy.

That the semi-fluid contents (which we now term protoplasm) of the cells of certain plants, such as the Charœ, are in constant and