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    The Past Condition of Organic Nature
    The Past Condition of Organic Nature
    The Past Condition of Organic Nature
    Ebook45 pages34 minutes

    The Past Condition of Organic Nature

    By Thomas Henry Huxley

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    The Past Condition of Organic Nature

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      Book preview

      The Past Condition of Organic Nature - Thomas Henry Huxley

      Project Gutenberg's The Past Condition of Organic Nature, by Thomas H. Huxley

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Past Condition of Organic Nature

             Lecture II. (of VI.), Lectures To Working Men, at the

                    Museum of Practical Geology, 1863, On Darwin's work: "Origin

                    of Species".

      Author: Thomas H. Huxley

      Release Date: January 4, 2009 [EBook #2922]

      Last Updated: January 22, 2013

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE ***

      Produced by Amy E. Zelmer, and David Widger

      THE PAST CONDITION

      OF ORGANIC NATURE

      Lecture II. (of VI.), Lectures To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863, On Darwin's work: Origin of Species.

      By Thomas H. Huxley

      List of Illustrations

      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 those who look attentively at the phenomena of organic nature 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; that a further study of the development of those different 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.

      We found that our analysis of the organic world, whether animals or plants, showed, in the long run, that they might both be reduced into, and were, in fact, composed of, the same constituents. And we saw that the plant obtained the materials constituting its substance by a peculiar combination of matters belonging entirely to the inorganic world; that, then, the animal was constantly appropriating the nitrogenous matters of the plant to its own nourishment, and returning them back to the inorganic world, in what we spoke of as its waste; and that finally, when the animal ceased to exist, the constituents of its body were dissolved and transmitted to that inorganic world whence they had been at first abstracted. Thus we saw in both the blade of grass and the horse but the same elements differently combined and arranged. We discovered a continual circulation going on,—the plant drawing in the elements of inorganic nature and combining them into food for the animal creation; the animal borrowing from the plant the matter for its own support,

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