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