2 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



experiment was guided by reasoning from entirely erroneous 

 premisses. For a long time subsequently, knowledge was 

 greatly advanced by descriptive investigations undertaken with 

 the assistance of the microscope. Later, experiment was 

 resorted to again, in applying the methods of bacteriology, 

 with results which showed rather what cancer was not, than 

 what cancer was. Biological knowledge required to advance 

 in other fields before the experimental method could be so 

 applied to the study of cancer as to yield positive contributions, 

 carrying us forward from where clinical, histological, and 

 bacteriological studies had reached their limitations, and from 

 where physiology and chemistry could find no point of attack. 



The Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts at Lyons 

 proposed the following as the subject of a prize dissertation 

 for the year 1773: "To form such inquiries on the causes 

 of the cancerous virus as may lead us to ascertain its nature and 

 effects, and best methods of obviating it." The foul sloughy 

 discharge, the " cancerous virus," proceeding from ulcerating, 

 septic, " open cancers," was at that time held to be the character- 

 istic of the disease, and the subject selected was the direct 

 incentive to the first experiment on cancer. 



The prize was awarded to Bernard Peyrilhe, who remarks, 

 in the course of his essay, " With respect to the contagious 

 nature of this virus, it must be acknowledged that, either exter- 

 nally or internally applied, it is capable of infecting the healthiest 

 of men." . . . He found that by the subcutaneous injection of 

 what he regarded as the " cancerous virus," he could reproduce 

 those clinical features which were at the time supposed to be 

 characteristic of the disease. The correspondence seemed to 

 him, and to the judges of the prize, to be so close as to merit 

 the inference that he had communicated cancer itself, although 

 the experiment terminated prematurely. His essay was ordered 

 to be published by the Academy. It attracted so much attention 

 that it was translated into various languages, and influenced 

 medical opinion for many years. The experiment really bore 

 on the transference of secondary bacterial infections, and not 

 on the transference of cancer. The experimental investigation 

 of cancer is to-day something entirely different. The sine qua 

 non to its satisfactory pursuit is the fulfilment of the require- 

 ments insuring absolute asepsis. The animals which are made 

 to bear cancerous growths artificially, suffer little or no incon- 



