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ceeding smoothly. In reality, the committees took no part in the planting.

And then, suddenly, a thunderbolt came: tax in kind, instead of requisitions, freedom of local exchange of foodstuffs, abrogation of guard detachments, and so on. The peasants, taught by long and bitter experience, refused to believe. And they did not have to wait long for proofs. When they attempted to carry grain to market, they found out that the guard detachments were abolished only on paper; that in reality they continue to confiscate grain, even when only three or five poods are carried. Moreover, all those who ride on the steps, or the buffers, or the platforms of trains, are liable to five years'imprisonment. And how else can you ride? Where is the way out? Last spring the peasants reëlected their volost, or county, Soviets, throwing out all the Communists. But the elections were declared irregular, the new Soviets were dispersed, and revolutionary committees were appointed in their place. Many people were arrested. Now the peasants pay no more attention to elections, and at the last election the Communists were in the majority.

The natural outcome of this is the appearance of bands known as the 'avengers of the people.'

You often see a sight like this: through the streets of a city, ten or more peasants are led under guard, their hands tied. The procession is followed by forty or fifty wagons loaded with household goods, agricultural implements, and the like. The peasants are the hostages taken from a village which has given refuge to three brothers, who have formed a band to wreak vengeance on the authorities. Such a band never touches the peasants, but attacks troops and kills commissars. Whenever the 'avengers' cannot be caught, the vil lages which are suspected of sheltering them are subject to reprisals.

Spiritually, the darkness that reigns in the villages is indescribable. There are scarcely any schools, no organizations. Newspapers are a rarity. News comes only from the 'bagmen,' who peddle grain, and from soldiers returning from the front.

Meanwhile the peasants work and

wait.

II

The Government of Kursk, a grainproducing province in Central Russia, which in normal times yielded for export fifteen million poods of grain, is now a veritable desert. The plan of requisition for 1920 called for ten million poods; and although the province gave only half of that amount, by Christmas peasants were already starving. The crops last year were frightfully small, and yet the authorities established over the peasants a veritable reign of blood and iron.

The worst repressions were applied in the districts of Sudgan and Belgorod, where the representative of the food administration, in his efforts to please his superiors, applied such measures as executions and arrests, in order to gather the full amount of the allotment by January 15. In some districts the only thing that the peasants received in exchange for their grain was less than two yards of calico and a pound and a half of salt.

Last spring many peasants did not have any seed, and some of them went south to get it. They were not very successful. And now, although eighty per cent of the land has been planted, the crops are bound to be small, because the peasants used from four to five poods of seed per dessiatine, instead of the customary ten to twelve poods.

It is ludicrous to expect that the peasants will be able to pay the tax and still have a surplus left to exchange for articles of general consumption. It is

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more likely that they will not be able even to pay the tax, for gathering which the Government will, most probably, use the same methods of persuasion that it used in gathering requisitioned grain. Under these circumstances, it seems inconceivable that the policy of compromising with the peasantry, which the Soviet Government had announced, will prove more than a measure on paper.

The general situation in the province is similar to that in other parts of Russia: utter apathy and indifference on the part of the peasantry toward organizations and elections, since the Communists always force their own majorities.

For example, last month there was a coöperative congress. In spite of all the efforts on the part of the Communists,

the majority at this Congress was antiCommunist, consisting of the peasants. Then the Communists brought to the congress forty-five city representatives; and when even that did not give them a majority, they arranged for the collegium of the local food administration to have the right to vote. Only then were they able to get a majority of 71 against 68 of their opponents. Naturally, they elected their own candidates. The peasants left the congress, cursing the Communists. And this is what the Communists call free and autonomous coöperation, based upon the confidence of the masses!

All public life is at a standstill. Only official meetings take place and official celebrations at which the people appear by government order.

CONTROL OF THE LIFE-CYCLE. III

BY JULIAN HUXLEY

From The English Review, March-June
(INDEPENDENT LIBERAL MONTHLY)

THE reason that the tissues of the adult do not grow is not that they have lost all power of growth. When an adult muscle is injured, the injury can be repaired. In order to accomplish this, the muscle-cells near the point of injury lose their characteristic striated structure, which enables them to contract, and become de-differentiated. In this condition they multiply; and when enough young muscle-tissue has been produced, the new cells differentiate again, and assume the striated adult structure. It would seem as if the power of reproduction and the power

of working efficiently cannot exist together in such a complicated tissue as muscle. An analogy will illustrate this. We have seen that an axolotl can be transformed into its adult state by means of thyroid. Now, if thyroid be given to a female during the egg-laying period, the egg-laying stops within a day or two, and the transformation begins. To carry on both egg-production and metamorphosis together is too great a task for the organism.

Something roughly parallel to this occurs in cancer. Each kind of cancer is produced from one particular type

of tissue. In every cancer, the special structure characterizing the cells of the normal tissue has been partially lost, and with it the power of working in the normal way; but meanwhile a power of growth over and above any possessed by the normal tissue has been gained, and the greater the difference of the cell from the normal in appearance and working, the greater is the excess power of growth, and the more malignant the

cancer.

In very malignant growths, as in some spontaneous cancers of the mouse, the cancer may continue growing, like a parasite, at the expense of the animal that is both its host and its parent, and finally suck it dry, as the stolon of Perophora was sucked dry by the healthy individual. In the competition with the body, the tumor tissues, simply because they are growing, and so working faster, get first call on the available food. Some tumors take their origin from fatty tissues; these may continue to grow and to be full of fat after every fat-globule - that is to say, every particle of reserve food-supply has disappeared from the tissues of the rest of the animal. The tumor may be well nourished, the rest of the animal literally starving.

Nothing could better illustrate that balanced competition between parts which we have already discussed in connection with metamorphosis. It is important to note that in such a system the balance should be capable of being tilted either way. Normally, the cancer wins; but if we knew how, we could so damage the cancer that the body would win, and would absorb the growth. This is what happens in successful cases of radium treatment. Occasionally a tumor will disappear spontaneously; in such cases, too, the cancer has perhaps been damaged in some way; but it may be that the cancer has not been damaged at all, but that the body has been

stimulated; for a raising of the level of the body-tissues' activities would alter the balance in exactly the same way, so far as result is concerned, as would a depression of the activities of the cancer.

Once more, the bodily fact has a mental counterpart. Obsessions, complexes, and fixed ideas, whatever their. origin, are always parts of the mental structure which have emancipated themselves from the proper harmony of the mind, and established themselves as dominant. They draw into themselves an undue portion of the nervous energy, and starve the other parts of the mind, finally causing a complete upset of the mental organization and total inability to carry on its normal work.

Harmony of the parts in subordination to the needs of the whole is one of the conditions of existence for higher types of life. Cancerous growths and mental obsessions show what terrible results can follow when a part becomes insubordinate.

Now at last we are free to return and consider the problem of old age and the prolongation of life. All single-celled organisms, which typically reproduce by dividing into two equal halves, have, as we have seen, in a sense, no death no inevitable death, that is to say, of their substance. Unless accident overtakes it, the substance of one individual is simply turned into the substance of two fresh individuals. There is a constant stream of living substance which moulds itself into a succession of individuals; and when we speak of the period of life, all we mean is the period of time for which one of these characteristic moulds or individuals lasts. The form perishes, but the substance need never die.

In the minute and simple bacteria, with their large surface in proportion to bulk, this period is very short, and division may even take place once every

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In larger single-celled organisms, such as Paramecium, which feeds on bacteria, division will take place two or three times a day. When we reach the multicellular organisms, we find the rule to be that a part of the tissues is inevitably doomed to death, reproduction here being the property of only one kind of tissue, the reproductive or germ-cells, and no longer possible after the lapse of a certain period of time. But even this is not universally true. In all higher plants, for instance, there exists a special tissue, the so-called cambium, which remains perennially young, and is always engaged in forming new layers of bark and of wood in the old parts; further, it has the power of forming new buds from which new shoots grow out. Some plants, like the banana, appear to have altogether lost the power of reproducing sexually, by seed, and must be propagated entirely by slips and cuttings. Here there is a compromise. If we choose, we can save any particular part of an old plant from death by taking it for a cutting; but the part we leave behind will eventually die. Again, in the famous baobab tree, the Indian fig, new stems are continually formed by down-growths from the branches. These root in the ground, themselves form new branches, and these in their turn new stems. By this means a grove of trees is formed which is in reality but one compound tree a gigantic colonial vegetable. When properly protected from goats and other browsing animals, such a grove continues growing outwards in a circle, like

a fairy-ring of toadstools. One in the Calcutta Botanical Gardens had some years ago reached the size of eleven acres, and was still growing. In the centre of the grove, however, the old stems begin to decay, and finally rot away. So that, although the grove, as a grove, has the power of apparently unlimited growth, parts of it become old and die.

Here we see illustrated the very important fact that the accumulation of old tissue may of itself lead to death. In the baobab, as indeed in trees generally, this seems to be due to accidents - to lightning, to the holes of wood-boring insects, to cracks caused by strains, and so forth. Any one kind of defect opens the door to another, and so with time the agents of death are summed, not arithmetically, but geometrically. Through an insect burrow, for instance, fungi, the agents of decay, find entry, and the whole region becomes affected and dies. If we could preserve the tree from all such accidents, there is no reason to suppose that it need ever die from internal causes, until, it might be, the weight of its crown became too great for its trunk to support. The five thousand years of the giant sequoias show us how long this particular contingency may be delayed.

These examples will have prepared us to find that in animals our preconceived ideas will perhaps not turn out after all to be right.

Let us first turn to the results of a new and adventurous field of research, that known as tissue-culture. Less than twenty years ago, the American worker Harrison discovered that it was possible to take a small portion of a growing chick-embryo out of the egg, and to cultivate it in a drop of nutritive liquid, such as the fluid of the blood. All the operations had of course to be carried out with the utmost care to prevent infection - with the same precautions

of sterilization, in fact, as are taken for any human operation.

Later Carrel, the surgeon, to whom a Nobel Prize was afterwards awarded, took up the problem, and, by develop ing the technique, obtained new results. After a few days a piece of tissue in a drop of culture-fluid will cease to grow. It has exhausted the available foodsupplies. This was got over by the method of transplantation, the tissue being cut into pieces, washed, and transferred to new fluid. Later, the interesting discovery was made that the addition to the culture-fluid of a certain quantity of 'embryonic extract,' that is to say, of fluid obtained from the tissues of chick-embryos, had the most marked effect upon the health and especially on the growth of the strain of tissue.

In this way it has been found possible to continue growing the cells of a single original piece of tissue (from a chick), not merely for weeks or months, but for years. When progress was last reported, the period was seven years; and the experiment was still being continued.

The cells of the tissue show no sign of ageing, and their rate of multiplication continues unchecked long after the same tissue in a living animal would have sobered down to slow reproduction or to no reproduction at all. From the evidence now at hand, it would seem that tissues cultivated thus outside the body are probably immortalor, if you prefer a less high-sounding epithet, that, even in the tissues of a higher animal, continued existence and growth need not involve limitation of growth, senescence, or death. In other words, the growth-limitation, senescence, and death of tissues which do take place in the higher animals are due somehow to the way the parts are related together in the organism, not to anything in the parts themselves. This leads us back once more to the idea of a balance — either a balance between the

different parts, or a balance between the different types of chemical processes in one or more of the parts.

As so often, knowledge of the lower forms helps us to analyze the higher. The continued reproduction of a protozoön, or single-celled animal, by division is in all essentials similar to the reproduction of the original cell of the body, the fertilized ovum, to form the millions or billions of cells which make up the adult, save that the protozoan cells separate from each other.

Now in a great number of such protozoa there occurs at intervals an interesting process which we know as conjugation. It is the forerunner of sexual reproduction, for at conjugation two cells come together and exchange portions of their substance. It has been maintained that the life of a species of protozoön is divisible into a series of cycles, each terminating with conjugation. Each, therefore, would resemble the cycle of cell-reproduction seen in the growth and ageing of the body of one of the higher animals, except that in a higher animal the cells stay bound together, in the protozoön they remain separate. On this view, death of the whole race of the protozoön is inevitable unless sooner or later conjugation takes place. Somehow or other this is supposed to have a rejuvenating effect.

In the last few years, however, various American workers have shown that by a properly balanced diet, strains of protozoa can be kept for years, instead of for a few months as was previously supposed, without conjugation, and the presumption is getting stronger and stronger that it need never occur at all.

It would seem as if, in the course of generations, the vital processes of the cells often become, in some way or other, unbalanced, and that this condition will lead to the dying-out of the race unless it can be corrected by that mingling of one cell with another which

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