Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1118/en

3. The Watery or Transformation Phase

It announces itself in the sudden subsidence of the heap. After the preceding dry phase, the heap now settles more densely and moistens itself, as through the breakdown of the hard-to-decompose cell membranes the liquid escapes from the cell vacuoles and intercellular spaces (Figure 16, p. 292). The heap closes itself more strongly against the outer world, no longer smells caustic, and in the moist-watery environment manifold conversions, substance-transformations and new formations take place. The small animals, foremost the *Collembola*, take over the direction; they comminute the material, feed on microbes and fungi and in doing so reduce their population. The proliferating chaos of phases 1 and 2 begins, through the mass multiplication of the small animals, to order itself and to articulate itself into aerated inner spaces. The environmental conditions shift, and correspondingly the springtails metamorphose from worm-like, little-differentiated forms into those with distinctly emergent organ-formations. From the BKV it is clear how one species follows another and disappears again. In this way, in the darkness of the heap, the world of small animals lives out evolutively a still lower, plant-animal as it were, mode of existence. This is irradiated, partly from within, partly from without, by forces of a differentiatedly working soul-astral. This sentient life makes the compost heap into an organism. In the third phase there takes place within it the transition from the still formless condition of the watery into that of the thoroughly formed earthy-solid — one single great substance-transformation.