Plant life seizes upon its required constituents, and by means of the energy furnished by the sun's rays builds these materials up into its own complex forms. Its many and varied forms fulfil a place in beautifying the world. But their contribution to the economy of nature is, by means of their products, to supply food for animal life. The products of plant life are chiefly sugar, starch, fat, and proteids. Animal life is not capable of extracting its nutriment from soil, but it must take the more complex foods which have already been built up by vegetable life. Again, the complementary functions of animal and vegetable life are seen in the absorption by plants of one of the waste materials of animals, viz., carbonic acid gas. Plants abstract from this gas carbon for their own use, and return the oxygen to the air, which in its turn is of service to animal life.
By animal activity some of these foods supplied by the vegetable kingdom are at once decomposed into carbonic acid gas and water, which goes back to nature. Much, however, is built up still further into higher and higher compounds. The proteids are converted by digestion into albumoses and peptones, ultimately entirely into peptones; these in their turn are reconverted into proteids, and become assimilated as part of the living organism. In time they become further changed into carbonic acid, sulphuric acid, water, and certain not fully oxidised products,[36] which contain the nitrogen of the original proteid. In the table these bodies have been represented by one of their chief members, viz., _urea_.
It is clear that there is in all animal life a double process continually going on; there is a building up (anabolism, assimilation), and there is a breaking down (katabolism, dissimilation). These processes will not balance each other throughout the whole period of animal life. We have, as possibilities, elaboration, balance, degeneration; and the products of animal life will differ in degree and in substance according to which period is in the predominance. These products we may subdivide simply into excretions during life and final materials of dissolution after death, both of which may be used more or less immediately by other forms of animal or vegetable life, or mediately after having passed to the soil. We may shortly summarise the final products of animal life as carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous remnants. These latter will occur as urea, new albumens, compounds of ammonia, and nitrogen compounds of great complexity stored up in the tissues and body of the animal. The carbonic acid, water, and other simple substances like them will return to nature and be of immediate use to vegetable life. But otherwise the cycle cannot be completed, for the more complex bodies are of no service as such to plants or animals.