We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.

Agassiz, when I saw him last, had read but a part of Origin of Species. He says it is POOR-VERY POOR!!. The fact is, he is very much annoyed by it.

This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.