1872. They are divisible next of all into two great parties, into the terrestrial and cosmical, or vegetative and animal. A. VEGETATIVE SYSTEMS. 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. 1880. We call this slime or mucus, nutritive matter. Wherever such matter can operate upon the body, a corresponding organ of absorption, and thus a cell or integument, will be formed. 1881. The whole body is surrounded by integument; it was originally nothing but integument. 1882. The essence of the integument consists in absorption, or in the intervention of the chemical process. 1883. The integument is the root of the animal. 1884. The animal cellular mass is, however, in conformity with its origin, a bladder or cyst that has been opened by light and air. The integument is a large cyst not closed all round, but open at _one_ end. It is the open floral cyst, which has just become an animal. The original integument is thus _Intestine_. The intestine is the water-organ. 1885. The integument presents therefore to the external world, or to the nutritive matter, two parietes or walls, an external and an internal.