From this general review of the physical construction and vital phenomena of the two grand classes of organized beings, vegetables and animals, it is impossible not to remark the strong features of resemblance, and yet the numerous points of difference they exhibit. Both have a beginning, which happens very much in the same way in each ; both live as individuals by the susception of aliment and its prepration by a variety of processes, which, in their essence, differ but little from one an other ; both continue themselves as kinds in a surprisingly similar manner ; both exhibit the changes denominated age ; both have a merely temporary existence, consequently both exhibit the phenomenon entitled death, and both are decompounded after the cessation of life, their constituent elements assuming new shapes, in obedience to the general laws of chemical affinity, which had been set at nought during the existence of the individuals in either class.
Notwithstanding these striking points of re semblance between vegetables and animals in all that is essential or general, it is impossible, as we have seen, to condescend upon par ticulars without immediately detecting differ ences that distinguish in the most marked manner the individuals of the one class from those of the other. It is always in their lowest
or most simple species that we remark the most striking similarity between vegetables and animals, and it is among these that we constantly find ourselves most at a loss for characters distinctive of each. We observe no evidence of anything like a connected chain of being from the lowest or most simple, to the highest or most complicated vegetable, and from this through the most inferior animal upwards to man ; it is, on the contrary, in the extremes or lowest grades of each. that the greatest similarity prevails ; here vegetables and animals approximate very closely, here they literally inosculate, but from this common point they begin to form two distinct series, which diverge ever more and more widely from one another as they ascend. Without attention to particulars, it would seem impos sible to adduce as ultimate terms of distinction between vegetables and animals, other faculties than those of voluntary motion and sensation as peculiar to the latter, in virtue of the one of which powers they are rendered in a great mea sure masters of their own existence, whilst by the other they are endowed with consciousness of many of the various acts that take place