244 SYMBIOGENESIS 



Hormones and chalones may be said to be the ultimate 

 agents of animal form in virtue of their evolutionary history, 

 i.e., the symbiogenetic evolution of plant and animals them- 

 selves. The share of the plant-world in this history must 

 have been very great. That the general effect of plant food in 

 the " digestive transformation " of animals is wholesome and 

 duly restraining, whilst flesh foods are accelerating and 

 disintegrating in their effects, I believe I have to some 

 extent demonstrated in previous volumes. I have spoken of 

 " katabolic emanations," meaning thereby the decomposing 

 (inductive) effects of flesh foods (as provided by perpetual 

 in-feeding) and their unduly accelerating effects upon growth 

 as compared with the mild physiological or " anabolic " effects 

 of plant-food which restrains over-activity on the part of the 

 animal. The colloid organised by the plant for animal food 

 having once yielded its symbiogenetic (reciprocal) growth- 

 tendencies to its complement organism, becomes itself trans- 

 formed into an animal colloid and, for therapeutic purposes, 

 from an anabolic into a katabolic agency. The energy which 

 it is now capable of yielding in great part is anything but 

 symbiotic, but tends instead to determine the evolution of the 

 ingesting organism along particular and "peculiar" lines, 

 i.e., mostly retrogressively. The erstwhile symbiogenetic 

 polarity is distorted by non-reciprocal influences emanating 

 from the tissues of the devoured animal.* Cancerous tissue (a 

 good example of morbid colloidal antagonism, of intense 

 histological in-feeding with frequently such stimulants as 

 choline and cadaverine) is known to retain some of the growth 

 tendencies of the organ in which it originated, and in a 

 similar way the ingestion of animal tissue tends to impart its 

 own (katabolic) tendencies to another animal. 



* It is known that a veritable bio-chemical system is involved in the co-opera- 

 tion of the various glands of the body, and that excessive secretion of some glands 

 during growth leads to gigantism, excessive secretion after maturity to acromepaly, 

 whilst insufficient secretion produces excessive deposition of fat and atrophy of the 

 genital glands. What is ignored, however, is that in this glandular interaction the 

 law of conflict becomes the alternative of the law of co-operation for the same 

 reason as in the wider biological sphere viz., transgression against symbiogenesis. 



