120 SYMB10GENESIS 



That this co-operation is unconscious is only parallel to the cognate 

 process in the economic world where the individual trader or manu- 

 facturer hardly realises that he is co-operating in equating the balance 

 of trade and serving his fellows as well as himself. And I regard a 

 highly evolved species, with its increased power of producing physio- 

 logical values and its inherited qualities and powers as equivalent to a 

 developed nation with its educated faculties and accumulated capital.* 



Fertilisation is thus attended by manifold services and 

 counter-services in domestic and biological symbiosis and 

 the tree's share of service consists in the manufacture (partly 

 for export) of pulp (amongst other things) the woody sub- 

 stance surrounding the pip (which, according to Mr. Pickering, 

 is really a portion of the stalk of the tree) gradually swelling 

 to a remarkable extent, and eventually forming the fleshy or 

 edible portion of the fruit. 



The stimulus that has brought new life has also brought 

 new activity with fresh services. The tree is not " devoured," 

 nor even robbed or deprived of its chances of producing 

 offspring commensurate with its biological status. Fertilisa- 

 tion is here seen to be in the service of general productiveness, 

 and, it may yet turn out, that sex itself is but a call towards an 

 ever-increasing symbiosis. 



The conception of a highly evolved species with its 

 inherited qualities and powers as equivalent to a developed 

 nation with its educated faculties and accumulated capital, 

 closely connected as it is with the conception of "love-foods," 

 opens up the problem of heredity. 



*'l notice from Prof. A. Dendy's address, as president of the Zoological Section. 

 British Association (Melbourne, 1914), that he favours the parallels with Political 

 Economy which I have been emphasizing for some little time. He speaks of the pro- 

 gressive accumulation of potential energy (or capital) in the germ-cells of successive 

 generations of animals a certain amount of protoplasm loaded with potential 

 energy forming the main part of an inheritance and of the sometime " inherited 

 incapacity for progress "being the same phenomenon amongst animals as amongst 

 men. Although he thinks that it is quite impossible for us to say to what that 

 incapacity is due, he states that "the contrast between man and nature is purely 

 arbitrary; man is himself a living organism and all the improvements that he 

 effects in his own conditions are parts of the progress of evolution in his particular 

 case." He answers the great question. " Why do organisms progress at all, instead 

 of remaining stationary from generation to generation?" by suggesting that the 

 power of profiting by experience lies at the root of the problem. It only remains 

 thus to be demonstrated more explicitly, how profits accrue, how they are 

 exchanged, distributed, mutualized, and increased, and how this (symbiotic) 

 process spreads and in the spreading antagonizes stagnancy. 



