Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The works of John Hunter / edited by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![table seems an intermediate step between common matter and animal matter. But observation will show that vegetables can readily convert both animal and vegetable matter into their own substance, as in the case of dung, which increases the natural growth of plants*. Both have a power of propagating their kinds by a production out of themselves, by which means the stock is replenished. Both are capable of being in two states: one of these is the living state, which we have been considering, the other is the dead state. Hence both animals and vegetables are capable of being considered in three ways. 1st, In their power of continuance and production, when possessed of their natural powers of action or life. 2nd, In their nature chemically as matter, which can only be considered when they are dead. 3rd, In their decay, or spontaneous reduction to common matter, when life is gonef. In all these operations they are totally different from common matter. The first distinction, or life, in which consists the power of self-preservation, is the antidote to the two last, since before either of these can take place the whole part must be de- prived of the living principle. When in the first state, their actions are either natural, the whole being in harmony, and every part acting in concert with the rest, which is called health; or they are unnatural, which constitutes disease, the tendency of which is to destroy the whole. When chemically considered, both animal and vegetable matter are found to be acted on by different substances, or are capable of solution * [It is highly probable that the different proximate elements of vegetable and ani- mal substances hold different ranks in the scale of organized substances, in the same manner that one animal ranks higher in the scale of organized beings than another. Thus, starch, sugar, and woody fibre among vegetable substances, and gelatin, albumen, and fibrin among animal substances, are raised, as it were, from one to the other by successive processes in the animal or vegetable ceconomy; so that fibrin may be re- garded as the substance most highly animalized, or as possessing the distinctive pro- perties of an animal substance in the highest possible degree. In this view, vegetable life, which subsists almost exclusively on carbonic acid gas, and graminivorous animals, which are able to extract nutriment from vegetable substances, may be regarded as subservient processes, intended to prepare the common elements of matter as nutriment for the more perfect animals.—which, however, afterwards undergoes a scries of further pro- cesses in the bodies of these animals, in order to fit it for all the purposes of the ceconomy. Sennebier and Saussure have satisfactorily shown that decayed organic remains do not nourish plants by being absorbed in their unmodified state, but by affording a more abundant supply of carbonic acid gas, which, in combination with water, forms the principal aliment of vegetables. There is no process in vegetables corresponding to digestion in animals, and hence the food of plants is spontaneously evolved by the natural processes of fermentation and putrefaction.] f [There are many other distinctions between organized and inorganized bodies, which, however, it is unnecessary to consider in this place.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21996623_0001_0245.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
