158 SYMBIOSIS 



from a highly civilised to a primordial savage state, from the 

 mutuality and security of a " city," to the loose and insecure 

 life of cannibal society. 



I would again emphasise the close analogy with Degeneration 

 in Nature. The possibilities of degenerative reversions and 

 abortions are the greater, the lower we descend in the evolutionary 

 scale. A fully extended reversion is not compatible with the 

 status of a higher organism, which yet, if parasitic or predaceous 

 in habit, cannot escape drastic penalties in the shape of suffering 

 and disease. Dr. Moullin tells us that there is a tendency of 

 the same kind of tumour to occur in members of the same family 

 at about the same time of life, which again emphasises the 

 biological analogy of Degeneration. For, as Darwin already 

 insisted, it is a general and important rule in Biology that " at 

 whatever period of life a peculiarity first appears, it tends to 

 reappear in the offspring at a corresponding age, though sometimes 

 earlier." 



I have italicised the last three words from Darwin, because 

 they seem to point to a diathesis a gradual undoing or dissolu- 

 tion of the particular species or family. These "peculiarities," in 

 my opinion, for the most part appertain to the non-symbiotic 

 and pathological order. This being so, we have to see in the ever 

 earlier incidence of " peculiarities," and of other more obvious 

 symptoms of disease in every new generation, an indication of 

 the progressive impoverishment of the protoplasm, tantamount 

 to a curtailment of adult existence. Speaking " sociologically," 

 we may say that there is an increasing veto against the species, 

 a diminishing sanction of its existence. The " wages " of a 

 prolonged transgression against the law of Symbiosis is thus 

 indeed death in the shape of diathesis, dissolution, and of a 

 kind of Paedogenesis precocious sexuality very ghastly forms 

 of which are to be found amongst rank parasites. 



Dr. Moullin concludes again I would say rather " historically " 

 that tumours are the products of the innate power of asexual 

 reproduction present in some degree in all tissues, except perhaps 

 the most specialised of all. The question therefore arises what 

 is it that determines the way in which the innate powers of 

 Reproduction are turned to account, good or bad ? And the 

 answer, as I believe I have shown, lies in the application of the 

 " sociological " factor to evolution. I have also insisted, in this 

 and in former volumes, that the asexual is an inferior method of 



