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