204 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



any secondary regulation with regard to the real production 

 of the ferment ? I am sorry that I cannot answer this 

 question affirmatively. Nothing is known at present, even 

 here, that really proves the existence of adaptation of the 

 secondary type : there might be a sort of statical " harmony ' 

 at the base of it all, established before all functioning for 

 functioning. 1 



The only facts of secondary metabolic regulations which 

 are known at present have been found in combination with 

 phenomena of restitution after real disturbances of organisa- 

 tion, where, indeed, numbers and numbers of regulatory 

 changes of metabolism, both in animals and plants, have 

 also been recorded. But there is not one case of a secondary 



/ 



regulation really known to affect pure metabolism alone. 2 

 This is a new indicium of the primacy of form in the 



organism. 



IMMUNITY THE ONLY TYPE OF A SECONDARY PHYSIOLOGICAL 



ADAPTATION 



There is only one class of physiological processes in 

 which the type of the real secondary regulation occurs. 



1 Compare the excellent review of the subject by Bayliss and Starling in 

 the Ergebnisse der Physiologic., 5, 1906, p. 664. The reader who misses here 

 an analysis of the brilliant discoveries of Pa \vlow and his followers, relating 

 to so-called "psychical and associative secretion," will find these facts dealt 

 with in another section of the book. These facts, indeed, would prove 

 vitalism, it seems to me. 



2 It would be a true secondary metabolic regulation, if after the extirpation 

 of one gland another different one were to assume its function. Nothing is 

 known in this respect except a few rather doubtful observations about the 

 interchange of functions between thymus and thyroid, except also the fact 

 that the so-called lymph -glands increase in size after the extirpation of the 

 spleen. Even here, of course, a sort of "restitution" would be included in 

 adaptation proper. 



