204 SYMBIOGENESIS 



terrestrial organisms, because of the more complex relations to 

 their environment, enjoy a quicker rate of change than the 

 aquatic, which is saying, in other words, that mutual industry 

 is more complex on land than in the water; and that, hence, 

 the higher evolution of terrestrial beings is a matter of 

 increased bio-economic specialisation, involving as it does 

 increasing bio-chemical perfection. That the "cold-blooded" 

 and predaceous crocodile is a failure from this point of view, 

 we have already seen.* Whilst biological factors are thus 

 more important than Spencer's treatment would make us 

 believe, we are also led now to concede a more incipient 

 "biology," i.e., character, response and even perhaps 

 incipient "consciousness" to organic and, to a lesser degree, 

 even to inorganic matter. 



The possibilities of response to stimulation by inorganic 

 matter and the phenomena of the fatigue, "illness," and 

 dissociation of metals which have recently come to light, are 

 further confirmation of the view here taken that the constitu- 

 tion even of ordinary inorganic components is more complex 

 even in "personal" components than has hitherto been 

 believed. I have given expression to the same thought in my 

 Nutrition and Evolution by stating that inorganic matter 

 bears, as it were, upon its shoulders the superstructures of 

 organic life as Atlas the vault of heaven. In the same 

 volume I have tried to show that the phenomena of the 

 dissociation (illness and decay) of matter bear throughout a 

 parallelism to those of organic " dissociation " (pathogenesis). 

 In the July number of the Nineteenth Century (1914), Dr. 

 Arabella Kenealy propounds a similar thesis (" Is man an 

 electrical organism ? " ) . 



Thus speaking of the (symbiogenetic ?) importance of 

 water, she says : 



*The Cetacea and their equivalents in degeneracy and monstrosity from the 

 secondary period of geological time viz., the monstrous marine reptiles, are 

 descended from quadrupeds which formerly lived on the land and, therefore, were 

 physiologically superior to their descendants. The latter, though atone time widely 

 distributed, " suddenly " became extinct, which is considered a mystery. Prof. S. W. 

 Williston suggests that the races may have become effete and died or old age. My 

 explanation is, as in the case of the megatherium, that these races have arrived at a 

 blind alley of evolution because of their persistent transgression against the law of 

 symbiogenesis. Hinc subitae mortes atqut intcstata senectus. 



