COMPARISON OF TIIE ORGANIC AND INORGANIC WORLDS.
Physical qualities and elementary composi tion of unorganized and organized bodies.— The organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature are distinguished from one another by many strong features of difference,—first, in reference to their general physical qualities, external form, volume, and elementary composition ; and second, in regard to their capacities of action.
The forms of the objects composing the inorganic world, indeterminate when they are considered in their masses, are reducible to a very few simple crystalline shapes when they are regarded in their parts. The cube, the hexa hedron, the rhomb, the prism, &c. are the ele mentary forms of the inorganic world : plane surfaces and straight lines uniting under differ ent inclinations, and originating angles that measure certain determinate numbers of de grees are the accidents, which give them their characteristic and individual shapes.
But the inorganic world has not absolutely even this limited perfection of form, if the ex pression may be allowed. In order that the ob jects which compose it may exhibit themselves under the form of crystals, solution of some kind, rest, time, and space are required ; and these or any of these being denied, the ob jects of the unorganized world present them selves or exist as simple aggregates of mo lecules, shapeless in their component parts as in their masses. And further, even when the objects of the inorganic world do present them selves under definite forms, these are not ne cessary and invariable. Carbonate of lime, to take a single instance, occurs crystallized not only in rhombs, but in hexahedral prisms, in dodecahedrons, the several faces of which are pentagons, in solids terminated by twelve triangles with unequal sides, &c. In their material composition, too, unorganized bodies are essentially homogeneous : one part of a mineral does not differ from another.
This is very different from what occurs in the world of organization. From the lowest to the highest of living beings the shape is determinate for the individual, not only as a whole, but even as each of its component parts is concerned. Instead of being cir cumscribed within angles and right lines like the objects of the inorganic kingdom, those of the organic are mostly rounded in their forms, or they are branched, or articulated and made up of several parts, which present varieties of conformation in harmony with the kinds of offices they have to perform, or the conditions surrounded by which the beings thus fashioned exist. Neither do they consist of homogeneous
particles like minerals, but are made up in general of heterogeneous parts : in plants we have roots, leaves, branches, flowers, &c.; in animals muscles, nerves, bones, and a great number of organs besides, each itself reducible to a variety of simpler parts or elements, en titled tissues.
The organic world also presents an immea surably greater variety of forms than the in organic : the myriads of animals and vegeta bles that people and possess the earth differ to infinity from each other in their forms and physiognomies.
Size.—Neither is there less discrepancy be tween the inorganic and the organic world in the quality of size, which, in the first, is perfectly indeterminate, being greater or less, simply as the constituent molecules happen to be aggregated in larger or in smaller num bers. The volume of organized bodies, on the contrary, is determinate ; every animal, every vegetable, has a particular stature, a cer tain bulk, which is that of its species also, and is within narrow limits alike in regard to all the individual4 composing the kind.
Composition.—Contrasted in their chemical nature, organized and unorganized bodies pre sent numerous and striking points of dis similarity. Modern chemistry enumerates no fewer than fifty-two elementary or simple sub stances,* besides the imponderables — light, caloric, and electricity. The whole of these are met with in the mineral or inorganic world; but no more than nineteen of them have been detected in the constitution of organized bo dies.t Six of this number, indeed,—oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, azote, phosphorus, and cal cium, occur in such abundance as to compose almost the whole mass of organized bodies; the remaining thirteen are met with but spa ringly distributed, and some of them even appear to be adventitious, and by no means_ essential to the constitution of the bodies in which they are encountered.