XIV. 



SYMBIOGENESIS 



The various kinds of labour and of 'mutual services 

 performed by organisms of all classes have their definite 

 (quasi-economic) value in this organic civilisation. In the 

 course of the development of this civilisation, capital physio- 

 logical as well as "mercantile " is constantly being created, 

 and consists in both cases of accumulated values both of food 

 reserves or surplus and auspicious or profitable capacities and 

 trade relations. The incessant storing up of labour in the form 

 of capital, and the continuous exchange of surpluses, are 

 indeed as indispensable to the preservation and the progress of 

 the organic world as to that of the body politic. The true 

 symbiosis here involved takes place not only in isolated cases 

 of attached partnerships, but also on a grand scale in Nature. 

 If it is generally less conspicuous than those few isolated cases 

 of obvious partnership instanced by the text-books, it is all the 

 more a genuine biological symbiosis universal and far- 

 reaching in its effects. If, as I hold, biological co-operation 

 is indeed similar to economic co-operation, it follows that a 

 distinction between biological (bio-economic) and physio- 

 logical partnership is but artificial. Just as in human society 

 domestic economy is part and parcel of national or inter- 

 national co-operation, so in the web of life all narrow or 

 primitive forms of co-operation are but foreshadowings or 

 variations of the wider biological forms of co-operation. Just 

 as national law has its parallel in international law, and both 

 act and react on each other, so in the world of life domestic 

 laws are but parallels and reverberations of the wider laws of 

 organic civilisation. 



Nor does the term partnership even so exhaust the 

 meaning of symbiosis, the effects of which are not limited to 

 mere quantitative results, to mere stomach-happiness i.e., 

 the production, distribution and consumption of the " good 

 things of life" although certainly it is a desirable con- 

 summation and also one of the material conditions of progress 

 that "two blades may grow where there was but one before." 

 The grand importance of symbiosis consists in the fact that it 



