222 SYMBIOSIS 



omnivorous tastes of our domesticated " productions." But, as 

 Mr. Kay Robinson says (Country -Side, 10.4.1909) : 



You cannot attach decisive importance to the conduct of domesticated 

 animals. I am quite sure that turpentine is not a natural food for horses ; 

 yet in Norfolk the farm horses used to spend a large part of their leisure 

 wandering round the garden railings and trying to nibble the turpentine 

 branches of the Australian pines. A well-fed domesticated animal always 

 hungers for novelty in food ; and I expect that turpentine or the mixed 

 tastes of Alpine flowers are to the fat cart horses what caviare and curry 

 are to us. The goats which ate the scarlet ^ anemones though I suspect 

 they ate them before any scarlet could be seen were domesticated goats, 

 which will devour newspapers with relish. In my youth I knew a goat 

 which had a passionate liking for tobacco ; and once I allowed it to eat 

 an ounce packet, paper-wrapper and all. It simply loved me after that 

 treat. I think, therefore, that we must discount the goat and other domesti- 

 cated animals as guides to natural conditions, although in some instances 

 their conduct may give us a clue to the past. 



We may confidently conclude that if animals are often lured 

 to their doom by their appetites, it is largely by their appetites 

 that they are led to their " lessons " and " industries." To 

 possess thoroughly emancipated fore-limbs, or even to have become 

 thoroughly arboreal, could indeed not have been enough for the 

 purposes of progressive evolution, if such emancipation was only 

 contrived for biologically illegitimate purposes. For, as we have 

 seen, genuine evolution is not furthered by methods of mere 

 expediency, but only by wide and bio-economic usefulness, 

 entailing a maximum of symbiotic correspondences. The 

 combination of " seemingly humble and unimportant circum- 

 stances, "spoken of by the author, as acting at the very dawn of 

 mammalian life, is none other, I believe, than the symbiotic 

 connection between plant and animal. This is how Prof. Wood 

 Jones tries to account for those early circumstances : 



The arboreal habit (he says), conferred its benefits by emancipati 

 the fore-limb from the duties of support and progression, and, by differ- 

 entiating its functions from that of the hind-limb, it saved the animal 

 from becoming quadrupedal. In differentiating the functions of the two 

 sets of limbs, the animal gains a great deal. Some animals, one might 

 almost say, have gone too far in adapting themselves to the arboreal 

 habit. An animal, saved by the arboreal habit from becoming quadrupedal, 

 does not gain the maximum of the benefits derivable from its new mode 

 of life, if it is saved from this fate only to become quadrumanous. Four 

 feet do not lead far in the struggle for mammalian supremacy, four hands 

 do not lead a great deal farther. It was the differentiation into two 

 hands and two feet that provided the great strength of the stock from 

 -which Man arose. The active specialisation of the fore-limb did much, 



