WEIGHT INCREASE AND INCREASE IN STATURE. 73 



not increased, and that the connective tissues certainly 

 exhibit hyperplasic increase throughout life. In the 

 muscular system it is the unstriped muscles in which 

 the tendency to hyperplasic growth is most marked and 

 continuous ; while this form of growth is not known to 

 occur after birth among the nervous elements. 



Should we be willing to take a suggestion from 

 pathology, it would be a fair inference that those 

 systems or organs in which hyperplasic growth was 

 normally most marked, and continued through the 

 longest time, would be the ones in which pathological 

 forms of this process most frequently appear. The 

 facts will, I believe, bear out such generalisation. 

 The epithelia of the body surfaces are very variable, 

 and adjust themselves to new conditions with ease. 

 Within limits they regenerate, as in the case of small 

 wounds, in the course of glandular activity, and the 

 like. Of the examples of hyperplasic activity of 

 connective tissue there would simply be no end, should 

 an enumeration of instances be attempted. In many 

 ways this least specialised of the tissues, possessing in a 

 high degree the power of hyperplasic growth on slight 

 stimulation, stands in the mammals not only as the 

 prime element in all bodily repair, but as ever ready to 

 assert its capability for increase even to the detriment of 

 the organism as a whole. In many cases, no sooner 

 does one of the specialised tissues grow weak and lose 

 the control which each healthy cell-group exerts on its 

 neighbours, than it becomes at once more or less over- 

 grown by these vigorous but comparatively unspecialised 

 connective tissue cells. The vascular and alimentary 

 systems, together with the uterus during gestation, are 

 the seats of the hyperplasic increase of unstriped muscular 

 tissue. In the heart it is more difficult to determine the 

 part which hyperplasia plays in the overgrowth, but so far 



