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The material element itself, with its actual structure as here conceived, is
of the nature of a necessity, rather a foreseen and a divinely regu-
lated thing, than a freely willed and primary creation, and as compared
with a world of spirits, only as a cloud in the azure-beautiful, indeed,
and capable of becoming the mother and nurse of spirits, and there-
fore sanctioned, but wholly incapable of thought and enjoyment in
itself, and wholly unaccountable if viewed as the whole of creation, . 81
It appears that a world of finite spirits alone could not exist without a

material accompaniment. Existence implies all its conditions. Ob-
jects which are to occupy limited portions of space must possess forms
and be subject to the laws of form, that is, geometry. Hence a liability
to suffering becomes certain; for with space sensibility has no dealings.
Its condition is time. And when attached to complicated structures
in space, whose well-being requires the observance of many laws,
sensibility in its reckless hunt for happiness violates these laws, and
so causes and feels pain,

All which, on such slight views as have hitherto been taken of these phenomena, has seemed inconsistent with the idea of a beneficent Creator. And as many ancients were led to ascribe the world to a Demiurgos, so have many moderns been content to adopt the theory of Topsy in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," that existence was never divinely awarded to creatures, thus liable to suffering themselves and to cause suffering in others, but that they merely "growed,"

CHAPTER X.

OF ALIMENTATION: ITS MODES, AND ITS UNAVOIDABLE LIMITS. The material element itself, compared with all its molecular combinations, is very stable and lasting. But if it has been generated out of ætherial elements as its ancestry, it must, under the law of assimilation (reversion), be liable to be resolved into æther, the matter of light again, most probably with some degree of luminousness, in the region where the solution or explosion of matter into æther is taking place. But, under the same law, those ætherial elements which previously constituted material elements will tend to do so again. And thus the periodicity, the cyclical character of nature is instituted in the very structure and nature of the material element itself, It is the heavenly function of respiration itself which gives a beginning, and institutes that system of alimentation which at first sight, and in its most striking feature, is deemed so objectionable and contrary to what were to be expected in the creation of a benevolent Being. Thus, since respiration implies exhaustion, it follows that breathers of the same kinds, according as they have breathed or lived more or less, are weaker or stronger. They are therefore dissimilar, and union will tend to take place between them. This phenomenon, when viewed in reference to the whole of nature and of the function, may take place

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in either of three ways. It may be (1.) transient (sexual union);
(2.) attachment (combination, differentiation, new species); (3.) absorp-
tion and assimilation (food commonly so called),

In order that animals may breathe freely, live, and enjoy their lives, food must be had; and since the genesis of vegetable matter is normally posterior to animal matter, the liability of the weaker animals to become the food of the stronger is unavoidable,

A perfect economy of alimentation, considered purely as such, admits the use of animal food only, for in this kind of food alone there may possibly be no rejectamenta, no refuse,

Also animals are strangers to all painful presentiment of death; and the violent modes of their seizure when they are about to become food for other animals, seem usually to produce anesthesia, and to seclude them from suffering, .

To increase the quantity of vegetable food, the continuous expiration of the
volcano, and the more secret action of the abyss, have been appointed
to second the respiration of the animal kingdom. And to increase to
the utmost the quantity of food of both kinds, the utmost fecundity
has been instituted both in plants and animals, which also secures a
maximum of enjoyment in the latter, for the sake of which alone they
could value life, which it is witnessed that they do upon the whole,
by the general struggle for existence,
This struggle, when expressed in its most general terms, is between the
leaf and the lung—a friendly struggle, in which the defeat of one is
in reality the signal victory of both, the leaf (the vegetable kingdom)
in yielding itself up to the lung (the animal kingdom) affording the
latter "bed and board, coal and candle;" then, phoenix-like, speedily,
after having been thus utilised, arising again from its own ashes as
fully alive as before, carpeting the planet anew with beautiful foliage
and flowers, fresh food for animals again,

A liability to pain is possibly implied in a capacity for enjoyment. At any rate, it is the most effective safeguard of the integrity of the organism. That it should continue after a fatal lesion, is in keeping with the operation in all cases of general laws,

As for death-supposing an internally reposing organism to be constructed in all its perfection at once, and placed in a wholly congenial situation, in which all its wants were statedly supplied, it would not be liable to death. The cosmical law (assimilation to self in every successive moment) would only act to preserve it as it is, like a perfectly elastic thing or mass, having a constant amount of inertia. It is birth and growth which carry in them the sentence of death. In that case the cosmical law, acting as a law of reversion, obliges the organism when it culminated in the ancestral type to live over again its life backward, and so to decay and die, that is, to dissolve into aeriform and earth particles again, and thus give itself again to nature on the grand scale,

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CHAPTER XI.

OF REPRODUCTION AND SEX.

Reproduction, that is, multiplication along with assimilation to what existed previously, is not confined, as is usually supposed, to organic beings, plants, and animals; there is all through nature the same, or a nisus at it. In a saturated solution, when a single crystal is introduced, a brood of crystals soon appears, or when liquid is poured in, solution of crystals follows,

.

When healthy plasma fills an open wound in the solids, it is soon assimilated, solid is reproduced, and the wound healed. On the other hand, unhealthy liquid assimilates the solid walls of a wound or liquifies them, and ulceration takes place,

.

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In effecting assimilation to pre-existing specific forms or structures, the cosmical law never forgets the type of all forms, namely, the spherical and cellular. Hence normal growth is always by the addition of cells. This energy may be such as to give first solid not cellular spheres almost all round (buds) or all round (seeds, ova). The motive to their development is a nisus at the cellular by protruding their contents. But the vital action, taking place along one axis, causes departure from the spherical, and gives axial forms. Hence segmentation, striæ, septa, nodes, &c. (see ova, muscular fibres, confervoideæ, plant axes, &c.), . 93 The fecundity of species is secured or insisted upon in virtue of the cosmical law and the analogy of all nature. The structure of the material element itself preludes an organism which, having lived its day and done its work, gives birth to four or twelve, or it may be twenty, ultimately thirty-two young ones,

94 The imperfection of the individual for the reproductive function implied in the fact of sex probably arises from this, that in the structure of the material element either the group of twelve or that of twenty ætherial elements in the nucleus may be in the interior, and that both cannot be equidistant from the centre, except on condition of the material element vaporising, or exploding, or escaping into the ætherial again. In the nisus at this structure, in which sphericity and cellularity culminate, adjacent groups of material elements will tend to possess, the one the one, the other the other, situation. Hence, being so far dissimilar, they will tend to unite, and each to abolish the difference of the other. Hence two results may be expected, (1.) a product from both, a resultant body, which at first shall be devoid of the difference (sex); and (2.) obliteration, functionally and perhaps even to the eye in some measure organically, of sex in advance age,

CHAPTER XII.

VEGETABLE MORPHOLOGY: ITS GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

The relation between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms, considered as one economic whole, leads us to expect that the animal form shall

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be as compact as is compatible with adequate means of locomotion, while the vegetable kingdom shall be (1.) expanded or laminated in the air to the utmost, exposing the largest possible surface in order to decompose the products of animal respiration (carbonic acid), and thus be suited to supply fresh food (oxygen gas) for the lungs of animals, and (2.) not be too tough for the teeth of animals, but such as to be fit to supply food for their stomachs, .

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The ideal of the plant-form is still the same as that of every naturally individualised object, viz., the hollow sphere. In all but microscopic and imperfect or short-lived plants, this is aimed at by the development of a system of peripheral tiling or foliage, supported by slender leaf-stalks or branches in the air and by rootlets and roots in the earth, both systems radiating from a centre or axis, hence trees, &c., 101 The physical agency in giving the vegetable kingdom to nature is, as always, the law of assimilation. Its first operation is as the law of reciprocal assimilation as to space, causing the air particles to descend into the earth, and the earth particles to tend into the air. Its second operation is as a law of assimilation as to state, the air particles becoming concrete as vegetable tissue, and the earth particles becoming as aerial as their nature admits by being carried up and located in the highest and most expanded parts of plants (giving ashes),

CHAPTER XIII.

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THE FORM AND STRUCTURE OF A FLOWERING PLANT AND a FLOWER ARE
PRELUDED BY THE STRUCTURE OF THE MATERIAL ELEMENT.

The simplest stable organism or plant conceivable must consist of at least
three material elements, the middle member being dissimilar to the
two terminal members, as, for instance, having the twenty ætherial
constituents central, while the terminal elements have the twelve,
In this chapter it is shown that the observed parts of plants and flowers,
as to sex, situation, and number, are striking verifications of our theory
as to the structure of the material element,

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SIMPLEST ZOIC FORMS AND FUNCTIONS ARE PRELUDED BY THE
STRUCTURE AND ACTION OF THE MATERIAL ELEMENT.

In the actual state of natural science, the forms and structures of the simplest organisms, whether microscopic or large, and whether animals or plants, are a perfect mystery to intelligence, nay, seemingly absurd. And naturalists are at present in a state of despair ever to be able to understand them or account for them, or do more than merely to observe and classify them,

The unity of the cosmical law securing harmony, nay, a certain homology

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all through nature, although the smallest object that is visible be as it were at all but an infinite distance from the single material element, explains these forms and structures, for they are preluded in the form and structure of the material element itself, . The simplest organisms, whether imprisoned (Gregarinida) or free (Rhizopoda), when reposing or hybernating, are spherical with some kind of atmosphere around them, and when active depart from the spherical, the free sorts sending out from their bodies processes and retracting them again, or surrounded by vibrating cilia, so as to similate to a remarkable degree the action of the ætherial elements in the atmosphere of the material element, still more clearly seen in spores and ova and fully-developed organisms, such as the sun-animalcule, Volvox, &c.,

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By considering the structure which must result from the union of two material elements, one of which has lived or breathed longer than the other, there is obtained a structure which preludes and explains the existence in animals of a head and body, the former furnished with a feeding apparatus, tentacles, teeth, &c., the latter with a breeding apparatus, a respiratory apparatus originally coming in between. (Many Infusoria, Polyzoa, Cephalapoda, &c.), Three such coupled elements may unite by both ends. There then results a new type, consisting of six members in a circular system. But these will tend under the cosmical law to apply themselves to each other on the same axis, thus preluding Annuloidea, Annulosa, Vertebrata, 133 Three single and similar, as well as three coupled and differentiated material elements, may unite into a closed system. And when this is the case, the law of the spherical leads us to expect that a fourth will immediately apply itself symmetrically to the other three, and thus there will be constructed a body possessing a tetrahedral nucleus invested by a spherical atmosphere or dynamisphere so stable that it can neither be decomposed nor transformed. But to be thus is to be dead. Here then, very early in the operation of the cosmical law, we find the dead appearing among the living, and the true protoplasm undergoing a most notable differentiation,

CHAPTER XV.

ON THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PROTOPLASM TREATED OF IN THIS
WORK, AND THE DEVELOPMENT IN IT OF THE ORGANIC ELEMENTS
COMMONLY SO CALLED.

Recapitulation of biological principles till the first differentiation of the

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primal protoplasm and the first dead element, the tetrad, is reached, 136 Simple groups of three elemental forces or material elements tend to receive one atom more on each pole, giving a molecular structure of maximum stability, whose atomic weight is 3 + 2 = 5, its symbol H.