286 SYMBIOGENESIS 



albuminous substances) produces poisonous effects upon many 

 individuals. It lias been found that individual susceptibilities 

 to such forms of poisoning are everywhere different, which is 

 hardly surprising when we consider what differences of con- 

 stitution there are in different persons, how variously they are 

 predisposed by racial and individual feeding and other habits 

 to various kinds of diathesis. 



The "abnormal individual supersensitivity of some 

 animals may be compared with the intense sensitivity of 

 certain human beings to sero-therapeutic injections." 



There seems nothing abnormal in the fact that men and 

 animals show a similarity of reaction to mutilations and to the 

 introduction of antibiotics for as such we must consider these 

 sero-therapeutic injections although varying in the degrees 

 of reaction. The fact that the reaction is universal and 

 attended by distinct and serious pathological symptoms, 

 indeed, necessitates the inference that for some reason or other 

 the injection of sera is biologically injurious, that there exists 

 a biological antipathy against such methods of treatment as 

 necessitate their use. 



It has also turned out that children of tuberculous parents 

 show increased susceptibility to infection by the tubercle 

 microbe, which is " directly due to modification of disposition " 

 a predisposition which "may be associated with a kind of 

 anaphylaxis," i.e., the individuals of such a stock have become 

 hereditarily "sensitised" by some poison to such an extent as 

 to diminish the usual resistance of their race to the attacks of 

 the tubercle bacillus. (Dr. C. E. Woodruff, late of the United 

 States Army Medical Corps, is of opinion that both serums and 

 vaccines tend to provoke tuberculosis, and to weaken resistance 

 to diseases other than the one against which each is specific.) 



The increased sensitiveness of tubercular stocks is due, in 

 my view, to a loss of symbiotics calling for active intolerance of 

 all new poisons. The same must be said of all those organisms 

 which through in-feeding and other biological transgressions 

 have suffered a loss of symbiotics, although it is customary to 



