Herbivore

“ They really do climb trees to get the food that a little insect brother, the bee, gathers and makes over in its own body to feed itsyoung just as mama bear gives milk out of her own body to feed her cubs.
How did animals and plants come to be so much like other animals and plants; and plants and animals so much like each other in shape, in their way of growing, moving and feeding and reproducing? Why does the growth of every tree keep showing us how many different kinds of things each little seed can grow into—root, bark, leaf, blossom, fruit? ”

“ Those of the Linnæan order, glires, [4] live on grain and fruits; each order of birds, keeps, in the same manner, to one sort of food, animal or vegetable. Fishes, reptiles, and insects, also have each their peculiar and exclusive bill of fare, beyond which even hunger will scarcely force them to wander. But however various each class, and order, and species of animated nature may be in the choice of food, man—all-devouring man, will embrace the whole range of the creation, “scarce a berry or a mushroom can escape him.” ”

“ All plants depend upon the natural elements—the soil, water, air, and light. Animals depend on plants. And many animals depend upon other animals. A forest tree in its maturity is covered with blossoms, some conspicuous, others inconspicuous to sight, but very conspicuous to smell. These blossoms, either by sight or scent, attract butterflies, bees, moths, and other insects to sip their nectar, and in so doing carry away the pollen of the flowers, and unwittingly pass it on to another flower and fertilise it. The insect thus enables the tree to procreate its species. ”

“ It is now necessary to look at the subject from the viewpoint of the horticulturist—​that is, the relationships of the animals to their surroundings, or environment, and to the welfare of man. Of the two great life-groups—​animals and plants—​the plants are of fundamental importance; without them no animal could exist, since, of all living things, it is the green plants alone that are able to convert the inorganic chemical constituents in soil, air and water into living matter or protoplasm; and all animals, either directly or indirectly, are dependent upon plants for their food supply. ”

“ ORCHIDS OR AIR PLANTS.
It is not easy at all times to say where vegetable life ends, and animal life begins; and were we required to determine the line of separation between merely organic and sentient life, by the distinctive forms of each, the recently discovered forms of vegetable life would greatly increase the difficulty. Resemblances to external forms of animal life exist in several portions of the vegetable world, but they abound in Orchidaceous plants, the latest, rarest, richest, and most beautiful addition to our floral treasures. ”

“ The Analogy I have already mentioned, which we may rationally suppose between the manner of the propagation of Plants and Animals, does likewise make this probable. Every Herb and Tree bears its Seed after its kind; which Seed is nothing else but a little Plant of the same kind, which being thrown into the Earth, as into its Uterus, spreads forth its Roots, and receives its Nourishment, but has its form within its self, and we may rationally conjecture some such Analogy in the Propagation of Animals. ”

“ These buds of plants, which are thus each an individual vegetable, in many circumstances resemble individual animals, but as animal bodies are detached from the earth, and move from place to place in search of food, and take that food at considerable intervals of time, and prepare it for their nourishiment within their own bodies after it is taken, it is evident they must require many organs and powers which are not necessary to a stationary bud. ”

“ Starting from that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes, till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree, and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and creeping insect. ”

“ If in closing these observations, intended to show the progressive development of animal life out of the life of the lower kingdoms of nature, we look to the changes which animal life operates upon them, facts present themselves worthy of the most serious consideration. We have seen how the vegetative life is nourished by inorganic life, and how vegetation in its turn operates changes in many ways upon the surface of the earth, and even on the atmosphere. ”

“ Apart from such special cases, the general dependence of animals upon plants is obvious, and is by no means confined to food-supply. Animals of all grades, from human beings to Caddis Worms, construct houses of vegetable materials; trees are the chosen home of large sections of our fauna, and the herbs of the field are the world for millions of tiny beings. ”

“ What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! ”

“ True, we cannot instance the automatic performances of the vegetable as identical with the similar endowments of animal life, but still they indicate a sympathy, a harmony existing between the two organizations, and show us how closely the great principles of animal and vegetable life converge. Indeed, as they approach the common centre, the little cell that is the habitation of both, it is perhaps impossible to say, here begins animal and there vegetable life. ”

“ Animals grow proportionally in all directions, while plants grow upwards and downwards from a collet only. The food of animals is organic, while that of plants is inorganic; the latter feeding entirely upon the elements of the soil and atmosphere, while the former subsist upon the products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. ”

“ Their habit is herbivorous at first, for it is from the herbage that they find their way to the creatures on which they fix. They mount to the summit of blades of grass, or tips of leaves, and, holding on by their forelegs only, stretch the other three pairs out so as to fasten on any animal that comes in their way. ”

“ The rootlets seize the sand and turn it to soil, to woody fibre, leafy verdure, blooming flowers, and delicious fruit. This asks life to come, partake, and be made strong. The grass gives itself to all flesh, the insect grows to feed the bird, the bird to nourish the animal, the animal to develop the man. ”

“ Food of Herbivorous Animals.—We must not forget that other animals besides insects and birds help to keep down the rapidly growing weeds. Herbivorous animals the world over destroy, besides the grass which they eat, untold multitudes of weeds, which, if unchecked, would drive out the useful occupants of the pasture, the grasses and grains. ”

“ Of especial interest, taking into account the wide distinction which exists between the higher animals on the one hand and the higher plants on the other, is it to find that there are still in existence organisms which are so much on the border-line between these two great groups of living things that they can be referred to one or other only with hesitation, clearly indicating that animal and vegetable life sprang from a common source. ”

“ Last of all the various tribes of vegetables are to be enumerated amongst the inferior orders of animals. Of these the anthers and stigmas have already been shewn to possess some organs of sense, to be nourished by honey, and to have the power of generation like insects, and have thence been announced amongst the animal kingdom in Sect. XIII. and to these must be added the buds and bulbs which constitute the viviparous offspring of vegetation. The former I suppose to be beholden to a single living filament for their seminal or amatorial procreation ”

“ There are undoubted animals which produce the essential material of vegetable fabric, or build up a part of their structure of it, or elaborate the characteristic leaf-green which, under solar light, assimilates inorganic into organic matter, the most distinguishing function of vegetation. On the other hand, there are plants—microscopic, indeed, but unquestionable—which move spontaneously and freely around and among animals that are fixed and rooted. ”

“ Darwin and others have established the generalization that members of more than one species of plants derive their nourishment mainly from animal matter, and that these plants thrive better upon such food than upon the ordinary kinds of plant-food. ”

“ The transition from one so-called kingdom into another presumably higher one is a purely arbitrary line marked by man, and often impossible to define. The animalcule and the insectivorous plant know no boundaries between the animal and the vegetable. And who shall say that the sun-dew or the bladderwort is not a higher organism than the amoeba? Animated plants, and vegetating. animals parallel each other. Several hundred carnivorous plants in all parts of the world have now been named by scientists. ”

“ They are a change and relief, in their soothing monotony and simple plant life, from the lush and variegated flower fields, the dense and hostile chaparral thickets, the dark forests of great trees, and the miles of artificial plantations of orchards and vines. ”

“ These zoöids, which each investigator names according to his peculiar theory of scientific nomenclature, we will call nutritive and generative buds; the nutritive buds being destined for the preservation of the colony, the generative for the perpetuation of the species. The attached extremity of the animal in the fixed, or its equivalent in the free, species is called the proximal end, and the opposite extremity, which bears the two forms of buds, the distal end of the hydroid. ”

“ With the other secondary objects of occupying and ornamenting the barren wastes of the earth with plants, and thus supplying food to hosts of insects, and to the higher animals, nature also has primarily in view, the production of perfect seeds for the perpetuation of their species, by the plants that are profusely scattered over the globe. ”

“ Vegetables pass through the changes of germination and growth, and feel the difference of soil, and winds, and temperature, and to the limits of these influences, confess them in color, size, and shape; but animals, endowed with acuteness of sense, enjoying locomotion, and related to all the world around them—living in all surrounding nature, and susceptible of all its influences—their individual differences know no limits, and they are universally unlike in appearance as in circumstances, training and character. ”

“ The recognition of the fact that animals feed on plants, or on one another, led to the obvious conclusion that the ultimate materials of animal, as well as of vegetable, structures were to be sought for in the soil. ”

“ This variety is visible to us chiefly on our globe; in the infinite multiplicity of its animal forms, in the wonderful insect tribes, and in the brilliant shells floating in the ocean; visible also in the incredible number of trees, shrubs, herbs, down to the most minute vegetable organisms, spread with such reckless abundance on the surface of our dwelling ”

“ Again, this perennial vegetation supplies abundance of both vegetable and insect food throughout the year, and thus a greater abundance and greater variety of the forms of life are rendered possible, than where recurrent seasons of cold and scarcity reduce the possibilities of life to a minimum. ”

“ DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN ANIMALS, VEGETABLES AND FOSSILS.—ON THE VITAL PRINCIPLE ESSENTIAL TO THE TWO FORMER.
Those who with a philosophical eye have contemplated the productions of Nature, have all, by common consent, divided them into three great classes, called the Animal, the Vegetable, and the Mineral or Fossil Kingdoms. ”

“ The earliest forms of flowerless plants, such as sea-weeds, and in dry places possibly lichens covering the rocks, were the highest forms of vegetable life. Animal life, if present, for the fact is denied by some, occurs in the very lowest form, merely structureless bodies, with no especial organs of sense, or nutrition: and their motion consisting simply in protruding and withdrawing hair-like processes.4 Such was the beginning of life. ”

“ So with plants, how remarkable it is that the organs of vegetation, on which their whole life depends, are of little signification, excepting in the first main divisions; whereas the organs of reproduction, with their product the seed, are of paramount importance! ”

“ As we see that those variations which, under domestication, appear at any particular period of life, tend to reappear in the offspring at the same period; for instance, in the shape, size and flavour of the seeds of the many varieties of our culinary and agricultural plants; in the caterpillar and cocoon stages of the varieties of the silkworm; in the eggs of poultry, and in the colour of the down of their chickens; in the horns of our sheep and cattle when nearly adult ”

“ Foin, Clover, and natural Grass, when their Roots reach into pulveriz’d Earth, exceeding the Increase of all those other Plants of the same Species (that stand out of the Reach of it) above One hundred Times, shew how vastly the artificial Pasture of Plants exceeds the natural. ”

“ I shall only remark, that vegetable life is as much the offspring of stimuli as animal, and that skill in agriculture [445] consists chiefly in the proper application of them. The seed of a plant, like an animal body, has no principle of life within itself. ”

“ Let me observe in passing, and without insisting upon facts known to all agriculturists and to all breeders, that similar phenomena are presented by the races of vegetable species which have long been under cultivation, and of animal species for centuries subject to domestication. ”