6 SCIENCE -PROGRESS 
interpreted, nor how the disease had been transmitted, and they 
had been received with scepticism apparently justified by repeated 
failures to transmit human cancer to animals. The recollection 
of them was born of the despairing hope that, perhaps, after 
all, statements relating to cancer in animals had been unduly 
neglected. It had been asserted frequently that the disease was 
peculiar to man, even to civilised man, that it was rare in other 
races of mankind, and in the domesticated animals with whom 
he came in contact, but altogether absent in aboriginal races and 
in wild animals. It is only fair to add in passing that veteri- 
narians had described all the main types of cancer in the 
domesticated mammals. 
At the time of the foundation of the Imperial Cancer Research 
Fund the position was briefly as follows: The gradual ex- 
haustion of the methods in vogue had led to a cessation in the 
advancement of knowledge on the nature of malignant new 
growths. The bedside observation of cases in the human 
subject, combined with anatomical, microscopical, and chemical 
examinations in laboratories attached to hospitals, had advanced 
to a stage where they seemed to raise more difficulties than they 
solved. As in the corresponding stages of previous attempts to 
solve other anatomical and physiological problems, the number 
of contradictory speculations current was legion. They were 
based on the same observed facts, which were being added to 
continually by other facts of the same kind—z.e. there was vain 
repetition. The exact knowledge of the disease was strangely 
restricted to its occurrence in the more civilised races of man, 
while the explanations of the observed facts roamed over the full 
field of medical and biological knowledge, and speculation. This 
discrepancy required adjusting. The impossibility of directing 
speculation into proper channels, or even of determining what 
those channels might be, by other methods, caused the need for 
comparative studies and for experiment to be acutely felt. 
The first organised attempt to broaden the basis of the 
knowledge of cancer, and of its experimental study, was made 
when the investigations of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund ! 
1 A “Society for Investigating the Nature of Cancer” was formed at John 
Hunter’s instigation in 1804. The German Cancer Committee was founded in 
1900 ; its work was, however, directed to applying statistical methods to prove the 
infective nature of cancer. The New York State Cancer Laboratory at Buffalo 
was in working order in 1899, the work has been almost entirely experimental ; 
but mainly directed to search for evidence in favour of infection. 
