1872. They are divisible next of all into two great parties, into the terrestrial and cosmical, or vegetative and animal.
1873. The vegetable systems can only be different developments of the tegument. They accord with the galvanic factors. Any further derivation of them is unnecessary. The tegumental development must be represented as the systems of digestion, respiration, and nutrition, since from it these have been sufficiently borrowed or derived.
1874. Except these three systems there can be no other tegumental system; and, if such appear to be present, they must be subordinate to these. For there cannot be subsequently any more than there was fundamentally or at bottom.
1875. In the animal, however, the galvanic processes do not remain entangled in one mass, as in the plant. But they are even characterized as animal by their individual liberation from the whole mass. In the plant digestion or absorption, and nutrition or the course of the sap, were in one kind of mass or one kind of cellular tissue, all three processes (together with respiration) being in a tolerably confused condition.
1876. The animal appears in its dignity by separation of these processes, and by the perfection of each individually, or "per se."
1877. As all life consists only in the constant conversion of what is inorganic into the Organic, so is the process of digestion or absorption necessarily the first in animals.
1. INTESTINAL SYSTEM.
1878. The chemical process of the galvanism is conversion of the Inorganic into mucus, and thus an assumption of this matter into the organic body. Now as every limit of the body is tegument or cellular tissue, so can this assumption take place everywhere. Adoption of what is external into an organic body is absorption.
1879. Absorption originates from the antagonism of the body with the earth, which is organizable, and thus with the mucus.