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.

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.

It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.

Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

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.

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.

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.