330 SYMBIOGENESIS 



do indeed alter each of us according to the compatibilities of 

 the case, and leave "indelible effects," is to me a matter of 

 observation extending over more than twenty years. 



It is clear that the frequent ingestion of flesh meat exerts 

 undesirable effects upon another animal's economy, the cumu- 

 lative effects of which its own vitality is eventually unable to 

 neutralise; and therein precisely we may see an explanation 

 of the aforesaid biological antagonism between the blood and 

 the serum of different animals which antagonism we must 

 now consider as a prominent fact in Nature. 



Forces there are, of course, locked up in all such sub- 

 stances, but they are not adequate because they do not 

 stimulate as "love-foods" do in the direction of symbio- 

 genesis, but of pathogenesis. 



We have seen, from the study of symbiosis, how Butler is 

 justified in speaking of eating as a mode of love, but such 

 love should be characterised by a high degree of symbiotic 

 reciprocity which cannot be said to exist between the blood and 

 flesh of kindred animals. The latter, on the contrary, must be 

 said to repel each other, chiefly for the reason that their union 

 is abhorred by Nature, i.e., runs counter to the mightiest of all 

 evolutionary laws, that, namely, of symbiogenesis. 



In some cases, as we have seen, the blood of one species 

 destroys that of another, and this has to do with specific self- 

 preservation, i.e., with the preservation of indispensable bio- 

 economic diversification. The blood of one species of animal 

 injected into the veins of another is an undesirable alien 

 element which is poisonous because it is utterly laqking in 

 possibilities of reciprocity, and because assimilation of one by 

 the other is biologically undesirable. Such a method is not 

 the way to raise the "tone," but, on the contrary, tends to 

 lower it. It is similar to perpetual in-feeding which we must 

 now view as a kind of close in-breeding seeing that eating is 

 indeed a kind of love though toxic and pathogenetic effects 

 are here as slow as they are also far-reaching. 



