Organic law

“ Mistakes in treating Organic Refuse.—Most of the shortcomings of modern sanitary methods, says Dr. G. V. Poore, are due to the fact that, in our dealing with organic refuse, we commit a scientific error—i.e., we pursue a course that is in opposition to natural law. This error consists in mixing organic refuse with water. It then undergoes changes which differ widely from the changes which it undergoes when mixed with earth. ”

“ The forms of organic life afford, however, the best examples of the dominion of our fundamental canon. The infinite variety of vegetable forms, all beautiful, and each one different in its beauty, is all the result of simple laws. It is true that these simple laws are not as yet all discovered; but the one great discovery of Phyllotaxis, which shows that all plants follow one law in the arrangement of their leaves upon the stem, thereby intimates in unmistakable language the simplicity and unity of all organic vegetable laws ”

“ The conception of "the reign of law" in the organic world ought to be much more widely and concretely established than it is in the public mind. Under stress of the necessity of dethroning notions of supernaturalism from living nature, biologists have up to now been so occupied with explaining phenomena in terms of natural causation that the orderliness of organic phenomena has had to take a back seat both in research and in speculation. ”

“ We may even go a step further, and say that the same law which governs the animal governs also the vegetable kingdom. Indeed, the further science advances, the more apparent does it become, that not only the animal, and vegetable, but even the organic, and inorganic, form but one world, regulated by the same laws. ”

“ But a decisive objection, founded on the most positive data of sociology, can be raised against the jury.
The law of natural evolution proves that no variation in the vegetable or animal organism is useful or durable which is not the outcome of a slow and gradual preparation by organic forces and external conditions. Thus an organ which ceases to have a function to discharge is subject to atrophy, and no new organ is possible or capable of development if it is not required by a new function to which it corresponds. ”

“ In the absence of that cyclical series of metamorphoses which even the simplest living thing now shows us, as a result of its inherited constitution, there could be no point d'appui for natural selection. How, then, did organic evolution begin?
If a primitive mass of organic matter was like a mass of inorganic matter in respect of its passivity, and differed only in respect of its greater changeableness; then we must infer that its first changes conformed to the same general law as do the changes of an inorganic mass. The instability of the homogeneous is a universal principle. ”

“ Such is however the condition of mortality, that the first law of nature is, "Eat or be eaten." We cannot long exist without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings, either in their mature or their embryon state. Unless the fruits, which surround the seeds of some vegetables, or the honey stolen from them by the bee, may be said to be an exception to this assertion. See Botanic Garden, P. I. Cant. I. l. 278. Note. Hence, from the necessity of our nature, we may be supposed to have a right to kill those creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us. ”

“ The continuous internal rearrangement implied in the development of organization is possible only where there is a medium degree of mobility among the particles, a plasticity such as is secured only by those peculiar chemical combinations which make up what we call organic matter. In the inorganic world, where there is an approach to organization there is an adumbration of the law as realized in the organic world. ”

“ It seems, indeed, to be a law of Nature that the ultimate destiny of organic matter is to 'circulate,' and that if it does not do so quietly, as in the ordinary processes of nutrition in plants and animals, it [130] merely bides its time, and ultimately attains its end with more or less destructive violence. ”

“ Although it is not easy to conjecture how it may act, it is conceivable that these conformities may be results of natural selection; but it is also possible that, like many curious instances of parallelism among the forms of plants belonging to widely different types, the facts may hereafter be seen to result from some yet undiscovered law regulating the direction of variation in the development of organic beings. ”

“ The plant absorbs the crystal, and it becomes a part of a higher organization, which could no more exist without its soul; and if the plant is cut down and cast into the oven, is the organic impulse food for the flames? You, the animal, do but exist through the absorption of these vegetable substances, and why should you not obey the analogical law of absorption and aggregation? You killed a deer to-day;—the flesh you will appropriate to supply the wants of your own material organization ”

“ If ever any theory demanded in its fullest import the acceptance of that old canon in natural history, quoted by his great master, "Natura non facit saltum," that of the gradual progress of organic life requires it to be acknowledged as its most inexorable law—a law as immutable as that which produces the unchanging forms assumed by certain substances in the process of crystallization. ”

“ So, in the same way, the man of science replies to objections of this kind, by simply getting up and walking onward, and showing what science has done and is doing—by pointing to that immense mass of facts which have been ascertained and systematized under the forms of the great doctrines of Morphology, of Development, of Distribution, and the like. He sees an enormous mass of facts and laws relating to organic beings, which stand on the same good sound foundation as every other natural law ”

“ You find the great sloth-like creature, the 'Megatherium', and the great armadillo, the 'Glyptodon', and so on. And if you go to Australia you find the same law holds good, namely, that that condition of organic nature which has preceded the one which now exists, presents differences perhaps of species, and of genera, but that the great types of organic structure are the same as those which now flourish. ”

“ We detect traces of this primary law in each division, or class, of the organic world; nor is its reality as a law interfered with, through the occasional exceptions which are liable, as in every other instance, to present themselves. Such deviations are often easily to be accounted for, whether by natural or artificial means ”

“ You found upon that a general law, that all hard and green apples are sour; and that, so far as it goes, is a perfect induction. Well, having got your natural law in this way, when you are offered another apple which you find is hard and green, you say, "All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green, therefore this apple is sour." That train of reasoning is what logicians call a syllogism, and has all its various parts and terms,—its major premiss, its minor premiss, and its conclusion. ”

“ A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death. ”

“ Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings—namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. ”

“ A tree, as a whole, is not a complete organization. There is only one whole, one true, organized product of nature; and that is the whole of nature itself. Secondly: If within the whole of nature we draw a distinction between organized products of nature and inorganic matter, the line of that distinction is arbitrary. For if it is once clear that there is only one complete organization, embracing all nature, then every part of nature, as part of that organization, must also refer to it, and thus the distinction between organic and inorganic matter falls away. ”

“ The plant gathers these inorganic materials together and makes them up into its own substance. The animal eats the plant and appropriates the nutritious portions to its own sustenance, rejects and gets rid of the useless matters; and, finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole body is decomposed and returned into the inorganic world. There is thus a constant circulation from one to the other, a continual formation of organic life from inorganic matters, and as constant a return of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic world ”

“ But is it possible to go another step further still, and to show that in the same way the whole of the organic world is reducible to one primitive condition of form? Is there among the plants the same primitive form of organization, and is that identical with that of the animal kingdom? The reply to that question, too, is not uncertain or doubtful. It is now proved that every plant begins its existence under the same form; that is to say, in that of a cell—a particle of nitrogenous matter having substantially the same conditions. ”

“ Chemical affinity, physical attraction and repulsion, mechanical forces may furnish many aids, but the study of life activities must go still further. To do this we must recognize the laws of organic life, the forces of growth and nutrition, of reproduction, of evolution, in fact a host of forces which have no counterpart in the inorganic world.
Modern agriculture and horticulture are so dependent on the principles of biology that to dissociate them does violence to thought. ”

“ Equally distinctive is the marvelous natural power which enables an animal to re-build its tissues as they are continually used up in the processes of living; for no man-made, self-sustaining mechanism has ever been perfected. The property of chemical composition is believed by science to be the basis of the second and the third; but this matter of chemical constitution must take its proper place in the series of structural characters, which we shall discuss further on as we develop the conception of organic mechanism. ”

“ The empirical generalizations on which the operations of the arts have usually been [pg 343] founded, are continually justified and confirmed on the one hand, or corrected and improved on the other, by the discovery of the simpler scientific laws on which the efficacy of those operations depends. The effects of the rotation of crops, of the various manures, and other processes of improved agriculture, have been for the first time resolved in our own day into known laws of chemical and organic action, by Davy, Liebig, and others. ”

“ As in the chemical production of any new combination of matter, two kinds of particles appear to be necessary; one of which must possess the power of attraction, and the other the aptitude to be attracted, as a magnet and a piece of iron; so in vegetable or animal combinations, whether for the purpose of nutrition or for reproduction, there must exist also two kinds of organic matter; one possessing the appetency to unite, and the other the propensity to be united ”

“ They become conjoined, numerically and morphologically, in progressive grades of complexity, originating by one kind of alliance the chemical elements which constitute the organic world, and by another the vital elements, which form the protoplasmic basis of animal and plant life. [1053] The organic kingdom rests upon the inorganic, and preys upon it, evolving 285 itself throughout endless time into more highly differentiated forms by its incessant appetite for material acquisition and sensuous stimulation in its environment. ”

“ It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases mechanical, character of a great number of the objects important in the material economy of human life, must be affected by the presence of so large an organic element in their substance, and it is equally obvious that all agricultural and all industrial operations tend to disturb the natural arrangements of this element, to increase or to diminish the special adaptation of every medium in which it lives to the particular orders of being inhabited by it. ”

“ That which is true in the vegetable is true in the animal world, as regards the pre-established order which regulates and controls the phenomena of life. These laws which govern the development of organic phenomena being immutable and everlasting, permit the different generations which succeed each other on our globe to build upon a durable basis, which certifies to the slow and laborious, but irresistible march of human progress. ”

“ We have gradually traced down all organic forms, or, in other words, we have analyzed the present condition of animated nature, until we found that each species took its origin in a form similar to that under which all the others commence their existence. We have found the whole of the vast array of living forms, with which we are surrounded, constantly growing, increasing, decaying and disappearing; the animal constantly attracting, modifying, and applying to its sustenance the matter of the vegetable kingdom, which derived its support from the absorption and conversion of inorganic matter. ”