No bacilli have appeared in their sputum for the past three months, and their phthisical symptoms have gradually and completely disappeared. * * * * * CAN WE SEPARATE ANIMALS FROM PLANTS? By ANDREW WILSON. One of the plainest points connected with the study of living things is the power we apparently possess of separating animals from plants. So self-evident appears this power that the popular notion scoffs at the idea of science modestly disclaiming its ability to separate the one group of living beings from the other. Is there any danger of confusing a bird with the tree amid the foliage of which it builds its nest, or of mistaking a cow for the grass it eats? These queries are, of course, answerable in one way only. Unfortunately (for the querists), however, they do not include or comprehend the whole difficulty. They merely assert, what is perfectly true, that we are able, without trouble, to mark off the higher animals from the higher plants. What science inquires is, whether we are able to separate _all_ animals from _all_ plants, and to fix a definite boundary line, so as to say that all the organisms on the one side of the line are assuredly animals, while all the others on the opposite side of the line may be declared to be truly plants. It is exactly this task which science declares to be among the impossibilities of knowledge. Away down in the depths of existence and among the groundlings of life the identity of living things becomes of a nature which is worse than confusing, and which renders it a futile task to attempt to separate the two worlds of life. The hopelessness of the task, indeed, has struck some observers so forcibly that they have proposed to constitute a third kingdom--the _Regnum Protisticum_--between the animal and the plant worlds, for the reception of the host of doubtful organisms. This third kingdom would resemble the casual ward of a workhouse, in that it would receive the waifs and strays of life which could not find a refuge anywhere else.