mbodied with the
whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the
engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it
must receive from the stoker a supply of 'energy-producing food'; in
other words, he lights a few shovelfuls of coal in its inside. This
heat will produce mechanical work.

Even so with the beast. As nothing is made from nothing, the egg
supplies first the materials of the new-born animal; then the plastic
food, the smith of living creatures, increases the body, up to a
certain limit, and renews it as it wears away. The stoker works at the
same time, without stopping. Fuel, the source of energy, makes but a
short stay in the system, where it is consumed and furnishes heat,
whence movement is derived. Life is a fire-box. Warmed by its food, the
animal machine moves, walks, runs, jumps, swims, flies, sets its
locomotory apparatus going in a thousand manners.

To return to the young Lycosae, they grow no larger until the period of
their emancipation. I find them at the age of seven months the same as
when I saw them at their birth. The egg supplied the materials
necessary for their tiny frames; and, as the loss of waste substance
is, for the moment, excessively small, or even nil, additional plastic
food is not needed so long as the wee creature does not grow. In this
respect, the prolonged abstinence presents no difficulty. But there
remains the question of energy-producing food, which is indispensable,
for the little Lycosa moves, when necessary, and very actively at that.
To what shall we attribute the heat expended upon action, when the
animal takes absolutely no nourishment?

An idea suggests itself. We say to ourselves that, without being life,
a machine is something more than matter, for man has added a little of
his mind to it. Now the iron beast, consuming its ration of coal, is
really browsing the ancient foliage of arborescent ferns in which solar
energy has accumulated.

Beasts of flesh and blood act no otherwise. Whether they mutually
devour one another or levy tribute on the plant, they invariably
quicken themselves with the stimulant of the sun's heat, a heat stored
in grass, fruit, seed and those which feed on such. The sun, the soul
of the universe, is the supreme dispenser of energy.

Instead of being served up through the intermediary of food and passing
through the ignominious circuit of gastric chemistry, could not this
solar energy penetrate the