OCR Text |
Show LE 0 TU R E II. TI-IE PAST CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE. IN the lecture which I delivered last Monday evening, I endeavoured to sketch in a very brief manner, but as well as the time at my disposal would permit, the present condition of organic nature, meaning by that large title simply an indication of the great, broad, and general principles which are to be discovered by t hose who look attentively at the phenomena of organic uature as at present displayed. The general result -of our investigations might be summed up thus: we found that the multiplicity of the forms of animal life, great as that may be, may be reduced to a comparatively few primitive plans or types of construction; th at a further study of the development of those dif~ ferent forms revealed to us that they were again reducible, until we at last brought the infinite diversity of animal, and even vegetable life, down to the primordial form of a single cell. vV e found that our analysis of the organic world, whether animals or plants, showed, in the long run, that they mi~ht both be reduced into, and were, in fact, composed of the same constituents. And we sa'Y that the |