BIONOMICS 241 



super-adequacy of force sufficient to accomplish a great step 

 forward. The ideal adequacy of properly matured plant-food 

 in animal economy is, of course, primarily and directly to be 

 inferred from its physiological good effects; but we may also 

 infer it indirectly from the inadequacy of a heterogeneous 

 albuminous diet and its immediate and more remote patho- 

 logical effects. 



If the effect of such alkaloids as Tutin and Coriamyrtin 

 though of vegetable origin upon frogs is such as to lead to an 

 extreme of respiration (combined with muscular stiffness, 

 sluggishness and in-coordination of movement, and later con- 

 vulsions), this is so because they are evolved for a special, i.e., 

 preventive purpose. The example merely emphasises that 

 the adequacy of food is determined by bio-economic factors, 

 and that for a genuine cure of an in-feeding diathesis we 

 should have to have recourse to normally evolved plant 

 substances by means of which to redeem the bad currency and 

 to restore the possibilities of generally wholesome 

 correspondence. 



Such plant substances having been " proved/' as 

 homoeopathy would say, upon healthy individuals, should also 

 be of considerable efficacy in cases of disease, provided the cure 

 is to consist of a genuine reconversion. The homoeopathic 

 maxim, Similia similibus curentur, i.e., similars should be 

 treated by similars, resulted from the observation of the great 

 potency of some vegetable drugs which invited the inquiry as 

 to whether they might, by appropriate means, be shorn of their 

 extreme effects and reduced to yield an erstwhile innocent and 

 beneficent action upon human physiology. Disease, amounting 

 in reality to a distortion of symbiosis, the problem before 

 homoeopathy is to cure by doses of vegetable extracts which 

 in their very mildness of stimulation resemble the normal 

 symbiotic stimulation exercised by plant substances, and thus 

 conduce to better conditions of health. Homoeopaths eschew 

 extreme doses, but first " potentize " them. It was thus by a 

 kind of intuitional comprehension of what was lacking that the 



