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                                                        INTRODUCTION                                                              21

 

be found in Chapter VI., in simpler language, just as we ourselves should probably starve if provided with food of organic compounds the opposites in light-rotation of those to which we are accustomed, so our opposites, the Laevo-men, if they were to come among us now, when we have not yet succeeded in manufacturing the more important foodstuffs artificially, would find our food, even our bodies, not suitable for their nourishment. That is, these foodstuffs would require to be changed, or inverted.” If we ourselves had to digest com­pensated mixtures, we should need a double digestive apparatus. He supposes that in course of time the one set of compounds as articles of food has vanished. If it were scientifically true, as well as “generally ac­cepted,” that the fertilized egg gave rise directly to an embryo or individual, then one of the sets would have vanished from the nutrition of all higher animals. Now, one of my discoveries has been that Pope’s hypothetical laevo-men do exist, and that they are represented by, among other things, the cancers. In this way the second set of nutritive compounds has not vanished, but at its basis the antithesis of two sets of things—compounds of carbon, defined by Pasteur — is the same antithesis as that of two sets of living things, asexual and sexual respectively, discovered and in the researches of more than twenty years described by me as occurring in the cycle of life of a fish, a frog, or a. man, etc.

The fertilized egg, and any of the (primary) germ-cells which arise later on, possess the intrinsic property (poten­tiality) of developing in the one direction or the other: in the asexual, with the cleavage of the fertilized egg, when trophoblast first raises, as in every normal development; in the sexual, when a primary germ-cell, which itself is

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