232 SYMBIOSIS 



upon science. Though the omnivore be less divorced from 

 Symbiosis than the blood-sucker, yet his promiscuous diet is little 

 calculated to preserve a " successful minimum of specialisation " 

 the " all, but no more than is necessary," which depends upon 

 an untarnished symbiotic relation. There is no evidence whatever 

 that a diet of seeds, nuts and fruits, which, on the author's own 

 outline, we may assume the Primate stock to have enjoyed, has 

 ever produced the downfall of an animal race. Quite the con- 

 trary ; the available evidence points to the conclusion that 

 such a diet constitutes the ideal norm for the achievement of the 

 highest progress. Evidently, however, the idea that some 

 kind of righteousness has characterised the human stock, has 

 taken possession of the author. He says : 



It is not likely that a habitat so attractive and so universally present 

 as the tree-tops would fail to be abused by some members of the stocks 

 which have taken possession of it. It is the distinction of the human 

 stock a distinction to which we have had frequent occasion to allude 

 that it never became the slave of its arboreal environment, for it became 

 adapted to tree life in a strictly tempered manner, and it specialised to the 

 successful minimum degree. 



This, especially after what has been conceded with regard to 

 diet, is but another way of saying that the distinction of the 

 Primate stock consisted in a steady adherence to symbiotic 

 moderation, which rather clashes with the previously expressed 

 surmise that it was omnivorism, a partly predatory life, that 

 conferred the saving grace upon the stock. It is no particular 

 distinction, on the author's own showing, to be arboreal ; and 

 it is surely much less of a distinction to be omnivorous. But if 

 there had to be a distinction, consisting in temperate behaviour, 

 at all, it may well have been that of frugivorism, which has so 

 much in its favour, as I believe to have to some extent shown. 



Is Prof. Wood Jones really prepared to say that omnivorism 

 is a means to the achievement of a successful minimum of 

 specialisation ? This would involve him in contradictions with 

 some of his own teachings. For he shows failure of progress 

 though with a perfect adaptation to omnivorism, and though 

 even with a previous apprenticeship in arboreal life, as, for instance, 

 in the case of the flying mammals. He tells us : 



A flying animal knows no limits of habitat or environment ; geograph- 

 ical barriers, which limit the activity and spread of the stock from which 

 it sprang, offer no unsurmountable boundaries to its enterprises. Indeed, 

 the geographical distribution of the Cheiroptera demonstrates the reality 



