22 THE ENZYME
TREATMENT OF CANCER
derived
ultimately from the fertilized egg, unfolds as an embryo or individual. What I
found was that Nature employed this peculiarity of the antithetic or opposite
character of certain naturally occurring compounds, all containing carbon, and
many of them also nitrogen, as the chemical basis of the cycle of animal life.
She did not attempt to unite both sets of the compounds, the 1- ones and the d-
ones, in any one form, animal or plant ; neither did she dispense with one of the
sets. Had she done either of these things, had she been able to do it, she
would have carried out the “generally accepted “ view of direct development,
egg leading directly to embryo. Then the egg would produce the hen, and the hen
the egg, and so on ad infinitum. On the contrary, in order to get back to the
fertilized egg again, Nature had found it necessary to separate the
“compensated mixtures” into their components, to use at one time the one set,
made up of certain 1- and other d-compounds, and then to use the other set,
made up of the opposite ones; that is, she swings the pendulum of life first in
the one direction, and then in the other, and in this way brings it back again
to the starting-point—the fertilized egg.
As
pointed out in Chapter VI., in connection with the account of Professor Pope’s
lecture, by means of two generations, asexual and sexual, which alternate in
the life-cycle from egg to egg, Nature not only utilizes two of the apparent
possibilities afforded by the existence of stereo-isomeric compounds, but also
she is thereby enabled to bring round again and again the cycle of life to its
starting-point. Under the orthodox and “generally accepted” view of direct
development these things have nut been explained, but they have simply been ignored.
The like orthodox views have also, notoriously, been