10 
ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 
turity an independent life, whatever may happen to it in 
the period of its waning. 
At the risk of stating onr conclusions before we have 
fully marshalled the evidence, deductively, then, normal liv- 
ing is, in terms of biology, correct living, that is to say, 
righteous living, and in so far as dependence invades the 
mode of life whether in organ or individual, such living is 
unrighteous, disordered and diseased; in better phrase, bio- 
logically, is without hope, for such perturbation or disease 
is beyond voluntary or casual rectification. These ideas 
apply not to the individual only but to the species, the race, 
the stock, even to the broadest divisions of life, the sub- 
kingdoms themselves. 
In speaking thus of dependent life as an expression of 
perturbation of function, it is easy to fall into misappre- 
hension, for in writing on the subject of parasitism the 
mind of the reader is likely to turn involuntarily to the 
overwhelming invasion of all the earth by protozoan and 
protopliytic parasites, parents of “germ diseases’ ’ and in- 
festations, sponsors for the deadly assaults upon humanity 
whose victims count up more than all other causes of death 
combined. We shall presently endeavor to indicate the ele- 
mental and historical differences between such unicellular 
parasitism and metazoan parasitism; the latter involving 
the mutual somatic relations of multicellular differentiated 
and well-defined animals or plants. The present statements 
are made with special reference to metazoan dependence. 
THE MEANING OF ABNORMAL LIVING 
From the world about us volumes have been filled with 
examples of these departures from the normal mode of liv- 
ing. It is safe to say that a vast majority of all life of the 
world is permeated by this loss of original excellence, which 
is, in more explicit terms, a condition of dependence and 
degeneration. We can not get a more impressive conception 
of its effect throughout all nature than in its elemental ex- 
