564 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



mentioned. Infective agents undoubtedly do cause tumours, even though some of 

 them may be of a doubtful nature, as admitted on page 7 of the Report, where 

 reference is made evidently to the work of Rous ; and it would therefore seem 

 dangerous to assert definitely that cancer is not due to some similar agency. 



In the statistical part of the Report, Dr. Bashford has rushed in where mathe- 

 maticians fear to tread. While he has wisely stated that it is impossible to decide 

 whether there is a real general increase of cancer, he has gone to the length of 

 coming to a certain conclusion that cancer areas and houses are " a myth." To 

 arrive at this conclusion he begins by criticising the statements of those who first 

 suggested it. The late Dr. Law Webb, who is quite irrelevantly stigmatised as a 

 general practitioner and not an expert pathologist, was apparently the first to 

 suggest the cancer house. Since then the question has been taken up on several 

 occasions and quite recently by Sir Thomas Oliver. The Report shows how these 

 gentlemen formed their opinions by inquiry in a few towns, villages, and houses, 

 and points out that the numbers of houses were not sufficient on which to base a 

 definite conclusion : "The mere enumeration of r,ooo or even 10,000 houses with 

 1, 2, 3, and more cases of cancer may merely be a result of the great frequency of 

 the disease." In other words, Dr. Bashford shows how Law Webb and the others 

 are wrong in their theory because they were random sampling. 



Having exposed this pitfall, Dr. Bashford then proceeds to fall into it himself. 

 He investigated some of the same towns and villages, certainly perhaps with 

 greater precision, but he does not investigate many thousands of houses, and 

 therefore he is as much guilty of random sampling as the people he criticises. 

 Admittedly he adds his and others' experiences with mice in " cancer cages," but 

 is it even reasonable to compare rows of cages in a laboratory with human dwellings 

 distributed over towns and countries ? Indeed Dr. Bashford's random sampling is 

 even worse than Dr. Law Webb's, for the former arrives through it quite unjustifi- 

 ably at a certain conclusion summed up in the word " myth, " whereas the latter, 

 only a general practitioner, merely suggested the cancer house as a field for 

 research. Surely, with the enormous incidence of a disease like cancer, it would 

 only be by accurate notification through several decades throughout a country or 

 countries, that definite error-reduced proof could be obtained as to whether cancer 

 houses did or did not exist. 



Dr. Bashford's criticisms are not always wise, as has been proved in the past ; 

 they seem to lack an open-minded purpose. He labours under a disadvantage in 

 that he is the Director of the Imperial Fund. Among laymen in this country and 

 among science workers in others a different interpretation is put to the prefix 

 ' Imperial " to that accredited to it by research workers here. In America 

 especially the term seems to mean an official connection or subsidy from the 

 Government, and utterances from it are treated in the same way as we now believe 

 in the statements of the Official Press Bureau. In reality there is little difference 

 between the constitution of the Imperial Fund and that of several others established 

 in England and other parts of the world. All are striving to elucidate the problem 

 from one or other standpoint. Yet Dr. Bashford is handicapped from the fact 

 that, although most other workers read his publications from the same point of 

 view as they do those of other research funds, the lay public takes them all as 

 statements of fact without any possible error due to experimental fallacies. Dr. 

 Bashford does not appear to realise this position ; his statements are published 

 without reserve in the lay press, which ought to make him most careful that he is 

 on the surest ground before he issues them. When he asserts that cancer is not 

 an infective disease or that there are no cancer houses, although he may be right, 



