You will now, perhaps, understand the curious relation
of the animal with the plant, of the organic with the inorganic world,
which is shown in this diagram (Fig. 3).
[FIGURE 3. (Diagram showing material relationship of the Vegetable,
Animal and Inorganic Worlds.)]
The plant gathers these inorganic materials together and makes them up
into its own substance. The animal eats the plant and appropriates the
nutritious portions to its own sustenance, rejects and gets rid of the
useless matters; and, finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole
body is decomposed and returned into the inorganic world. There is
thus a constant circulation from one to the other, a continual
formation of organic life from inorganic matters, and as constant a
return of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic world; so that
the materials of which our bodies are composed are largely, in all
probability, the substances which constituted the matter of long
extinct creations, but which have in the interval constituted a part of
the inorganic world.
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