21 SYMBIOGENESIS 



becomes first discernible by the eye in the bud stage, though there is 

 obviously an earlier stage. Each is capable of leading an independent 

 existence. It may be separated from the rest of the community, and if 

 it is placed in a suitable environment, and provided with suitable food, 

 it will continue to live and to perform its natural functions. 



Evidently symbiosis cuts deeper than has hitherto been 

 supposed, and evidently domestic and biological symbiosis are, 

 at bottom, one and the same thing. Evidently, again, co-opera- 

 tion, however unconscious, fundamentally underlies all 

 organic life. There is no miracle about form-production ! It 

 is due to individuality, to the work and the co-operation of 

 individuals. If intelligence, however incipient, was concerned 

 in the (symbiotic) integration of form, those Greek philosophers 

 (who forestalled so much of modern science) who held that 

 Mind formed the Body and that it was wrong to say that the 

 mind was in the body : the body being in the mind, may not 

 have been far wrong. There is no miracle about the fact that 

 a bit of a twig sometimes is able to reproduce the whole plant ! 

 " It cannot do so unless there are buds on it; they may not 

 always be visible to the naked eye, but there they are ; without 

 them it must die." In other words, again, reproduction of 

 form (heredity!), like its original production, depends on 

 individuality, itself dependent upon values accumulated by 

 symbiogenesis. The bearers of these values in the case of 

 plants are the plantagens. We can now better understand the 

 significance of Prof. Klebs' remarks concerning " the inner 

 world " of organism, and if, as he says, it is on this inner 

 world that the environment exerts its influence, and that the 

 importance of the " inner world " increases with the degree of 

 differentiation, we are again justified in concluding that it is 

 primarily work and symbiosis which are responsible for the 

 production of form and of evolution. 



By tracing symbiosis more profoundly than has hitherto 

 been done, we thus arrive at a clearer conception of the most 

 common modes of plant-reproduction. It is, on the one hand, 

 symbiotic specialisation, with sacrifice of the freedom and 



