However, in order to avoid misunderstanding, we must take the word "organism" in the sense in which most biologists use it--namely, to designate an individual living thing, the material substratum of which is plasm or "living substance"--a nitrogenous carbon-compound in a semi-fluid condition. It leads to a good deal of misunderstanding when separate functions are called organisms, as is done sometimes in speaking of the soul or of speech. It would be just as correct to call seeing or running an organism. It is advisable also in scientific treatises to refrain from calling inorganic compounds as such "organisms," as, for instance, the sea or the whole earth. Such names, having a purely symbolical value, may very well be used in poetry. The rhythmic wave-movement of the ocean may be regarded as its respiration, the surge as its voice, and so on. Many scientists (like Fechner) conceive the whole earth with all its organic and inorganic contents as a gigantic organism, whose countless organs have been arranged in an orderly whole by the world-reason (God). In the same way the physiologist, Preyer, regards the glowing heavenly bodies as "gigantic organisms, whose breath is, perhaps, the glowing vapor of iron, whose blood is liquid metal, and whose food may be meteorites." The danger of this poetic application of the metaphorical sense of organism is very well seen in this instance, as Preyer builds on it a quite untenable hypothesis of the origin of life (see chapter xv.). In the wider sense the word "organic" has long been used in chemistry as an antithesis to inorganic. By organic chemistry is generally understood the chemistry of the compounds of carbon, that element being distinguished from all the others (some seventy-eight in number) by very important properties. It has, in the first place, the property of entering into an immense variety of combinations with other elements, and especially of uniting with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur to form the most complicated albuminoids (see the _Riddle_, chapter xiv.). Carbon is a biogenetic element of the first importance, as I explained in my carbon-theory in 1866. It might even be called "the creator of the organic world." At first these organogenetic compounds do not appear in the organism in organized form--that is to say, they are not yet distributed into organs with definite purposes. Such organization is a result, not the cause, of the life-process.