The
animal's body is, in fact, breaking down into the very things on which
the green plant feeds. We ourselves are perpetually dissipating our
substance in our acts of life and work into the carbonic acid, water,
ammonia, and minerals on which plants feed. We "die daily" in as true
a sense as that in which the apostle used the term. And out of the
debris of the animal frame the green plant builds up leaf and flower,
stein and branch, and all the other tokens of its beauty and its life.
If, then, an animal can only live upon living matter--that is to say
on the bodies of other animals or of plants--with water, minerals and
oxygen gas from the air thrown in to boot, we might be tempted to hold
that in such distinctive ways and works we had at last found a means
of separating animals from plants. Unfortunately, this view may be
legitimately disputed and rendered null and void, on two grounds.
First of all, the mushrooms and their friends and neighbors, all true
plants, do not feed as do the green tribes. And secondly, many of the
green plants themselves can be shown to have taken very kindly to an
animal mode of diet.
A mushroom, thus, because it has no green color, lives upon water,
oxygen, minerals, and organic matter.
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