SYMBIOSIS 65 



cases produces very obvious and conspicuous self-destructive 

 propensities in a species is well borne out by the case of certain 

 carnivora, which, in the depravity of their appetites, devour 

 their own young, or, in captivity, turn upon their own bodies 

 and do themselves serious or even fatal harm. In se semper 

 armatus Furor. It may also be added in this connection that 

 like the carnivora, the Convoluta are characteristically evil- 

 smelling " beasts." 



When Prof. Keeble says that a number of the independent 

 Chlamydomonadinece in the ordinary way are inclined to 

 become saprophytes "colourless cells which batten on the 

 offal of the sea " this again illustrates the parallelism with 

 carnivora which latter are battening on the offal of terrestrial 

 life, with identical negative biological results. 



Even the facts of Chemotactism bear out the same parallel. 

 Those of the flagellated algal cells which were hankering after 

 the nitrogen preserves the uric acid of the animal and 

 presently are to share the fate of all sustained profligates, 

 namely, degeneration and untimely death, are attracted to the 

 egg-capsules of the evil-smelling animal by chemotactic 

 influences. All profligate organisms are thus liable to attrac- 

 tions by pathological emanations, and degenerates of most 

 varying types are thus gathered together by their morbid 

 inclinations a veritable diabolic " selection," as I have 

 termed it in my Nutrition and Evolution. "I have left you 

 free to choose between life and death and good and evil." It 

 was reported in the Times (17/11/13) as a statement by Sir 

 Emerson Tennant that the savageness and man-eating pro- 

 pensities of leopards are such as to render them " peculiarly 

 attracted, presumably by scent, to patients suffering from 

 small-pox, so that the medical officers in charge of small-pox 

 hospitals in leopard-haunted countries have to take especial 

 precautions to keep the animals away." 



In a similar way it is held by some botanists that if a 

 parasitic hyphas pierces some plants or their stomata and 

 refuses to enter others, this is because in the former case there 



