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     158                                 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

 

of that which obtains with the unfolding of the sexual generation, “the embryo” or individual. Here the naturally occurring organic compounds are evolved in the direction of dextro-sugars, dextro-glycogen, and laevo-­albumins. It is of great interest to compare together animals and plants in this connection. As I wrote some years ago, “the plan carried out in animals has been such as to favour the ever greater and greater amplifica­tion of the sexual generation. In plants, as elsewhere already insisted, the reverse is the case. Here the asexual generation has undergone increased amplification without ever being able to attain to any very high degree of histo­logical differentiation. The sexual generation of plants is at the best a miserable failure from the morphological point of view, and this must be set down to the factors indicated, and still more to others yet to be described. The higher one ascends, the smaller it becomes, until, in the highest flowering plants, it has almost reached the vanishing point, without, however, being able to dis­appear entirely. In animals it is the phorozoon or asexual generation which makes the bravest show in the lower metazoa; but even here it is usually overshadowed in degree of morphological differentiation by the embryo or sexual generation. In the higher forms it becomes reduced; but, like the rudimentary sexual generation of the higher plants, it cannot vanish, for it also has its assigned task in the reproductive round.” The scientific investigator does not, of course, deal in a priori arguments. Were he to do so, he would expect to find the conditions exactly the same in plants as in animals. For is it not “generally held,” and for this reason scientifically correct, that animals and plants have a common ancestry? Do not zoologists and botanists agree that at the bottom of the scale animals

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