xvi. SYMBIOGENESIS 



one case being parallel to digestion and maturation (of food) in 

 the other. 



It is said that " The eternal Feminine draws us on," and, 

 indeed, how profound is the influence of sex! How much of 

 values is there involved ! Yet how little do we realise how the 

 sacred flame of sex is constituted, how its potency is derived 

 from the immemorial activities of manifold symbiotic forces. 

 Far less still is it realised to what an extent a similar pair of 

 symbiotic opposites (as male and female), and, indeed, a 

 similar and fundamentally important symbiogenesis, are 

 entailed in nutrition which as above said everywhere provides 

 the parallel to sex. 



Prof. Weismann's "amphimixis" (the mingling of 

 parental qualities in fertilisation), which according to him is 

 a great cause of progressive variation, is but one mode, viz., 

 the domestic or the sexual mode of symbiogenesis. Nutrition 

 is another, viz., the biological or bio-economic mode, no less 

 important. 



In previous volumes I have endeavoured to show, what is 

 here becoming more apparent still, that nutrition is of such 

 importance in genetics that we may fitly speak of nutritional 

 " amphimixis " as preceding sexual amphimixis, and of 

 nutritional "gestation" as preceding and complementing 

 sexual gestation. 



According to Goethe, " Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft " 

 (i.e., blood is quite a special sap), and indications are 

 emerging on every hand that similarly every food substance has 

 its own particular significance according to origin, which seems 

 to confirm my inference that the relations normally obtaining 

 in feeding are definitely regulated by a fundamental biological 

 requirement or law, viz., that of reciprocity, or, more widely 

 stated, that of symbiogenesis. By symbiogenesis I mean the 

 production and increase of values throughout organic life by 

 means of a symbiotic principle of co-operation or reciprocity 

 between different organs of the individual, but evolved and 

 complex body, as well as between different organisms in a 



