1828. Osseous or limitary organs will become more rigid in the air than in water. The air-breathing animals must have more perfect bones or harder limitary organs.
1829. Bones are therefore either wanting completely in the aquatic animals, or they are mucus scarcely oxydized, in other words, cartilage; or finally, almost entirely rough carbonated earth, in the corals and shells.
1830. This theory is most beautifully proved in the corals. Internally they consist of granular substance, like the polyps, or of sentient nervous mass; externally they are simply earth or globular form, which is the rudest antagonism presented to the likewise rude central mass.
1831. Bone essentially surrounds the nervous mass. The skull environs and incloses the brain, the vertebræ the spinal cord, the ribs, the visceral nerves the snail's shell all the soft parts of that animal, the coral stem its polyp-tube, the horny coat the insect.
1832. The purest and highest antagonisms in an animal are nerve and bone, and as such they are demonstrated on every occasion. The nerve is that which is soft, powerless, changeable, sentient, governing, and motion-imparting; the bone, what is hard, strong, unchangeable, non-sentient, governed, and becoming moved; the one properly speaking the spiritually vitalizing, the other the spiritually dead, or self-subsistent simply in a mineral point of view. The bone is the obedient planet of the nerve.
1833. Point-and globe-form are consequently, as regards the tissue of the substance, the first two forms of the animal body.
1834. What develops itself apart from nerve and bone in the animal, must either range between or below both; it must participate of both forms, or be only their incompletion.
3. Fibrous Tissue.
1835. The nervous and osseous substance could not range opposite to each other, without a transition or a something interposing; as little as could æther and Terrestrial, or sun and planet, between which the moved æther or the heat oscillates, and conditionates the planetary motion.
1836. Between the soft point-form of the nerve and the hard globe-form of the bone, a semi-oxydation stands midway, just as the air stands between the æther and the earth. As this is the medium element, wherein the light is refracted into colours, and thereby warms and moves the planet, so must this median animal formation be the element, through which the nerve imparts its motion to the bones.