PATHOGENESIS 331 



Perpetual in-feeding yields forces which gradually 

 achieve an undue dominance of alien elements, which are 

 never thoroughly or desirably assimilable or to any 

 degree reciprocal or useful, and therefore landing the species 

 finally in degeneration or extinction. Such "incest" once 

 begun, like other forms of depravity, is apt to spread and 

 gain momentum until it ends in destruction. 



In se semper armatus Furor, as Seneca has it. 



Fortunately for all of us although we will admit that 

 "the domain of anaphylaxis is immense" ancestral 

 alimentary ingestions of a normal (cross-feeding) order have 

 far outweighed incestuous "intoxications." Otherwise patho- 

 genesis would have prevailed over sym biogenesis, and no 

 amount of anti-anaphylactics could have averted our doom. 



The injection of albuminoids, according to Prof. Richet, 

 either increases the vulnerability of the living cell or it 

 diminishes it, or it exerts both these contrary functions, 

 according to the individual. But we must count the total cost, 

 when it will be seen that the diminution of vulnerability in 

 some cases is more apparent than real, and that the main 

 injury is the positive reduction or relative handicapping of the 

 general symbiotic powers of the organism. That the organism 

 is never the same again after an injection, and has hence also 

 biologically deteriorated ; that it has thus been permanently 

 modified according to pathogenesis rather than symbiogenesis, 

 are eloquent facts. That the injection of certain mainly 

 animal albuminoids is so widely resented by the animal 

 physiology speaks volumes for their general unsuitability as 

 foods, and indicates at the same time that every suppression of 

 the protective reaction of the body amounts to a suppression of 

 a valuable safeguard of racial purity. 



Prof. Richet hopes that some day, " when we shall have 

 thoroughly studied general physiology and the physiology of 

 species," we shall understand more about the idiosyncrasies 

 exhibited by anaphylactic phenomena, and that then the 



