ON CANCER 205 



use the forces and materials which it finds belonging to 

 the structure selected, which it ultimately overruns and 

 perverts from innocency to malignancy, to the entire 

 undoing of its ultimately powerless host. What that 

 materies morbi may be is a question no doubt of the very 

 greatest interest and importance, but the work of depriv- 

 ing it of the means of support and propagation is a work 

 of proportionate and even greater importance, and one 

 which, in these days of the conferring of immunity, should 

 not be beyond the powers of properly directed effort and 

 the combined working of the agencies now employed on 

 the problem. 



Whatever the materies morbi of cancer be, whether 

 microbic and the weight of evidence favours that view 

 or not, it seems to gain access to the seat of attack through, 

 in the first instance, permeable layers of tissue, reachable 

 from the most accessible inner or outer coverings of the 

 body, such as the sub-mucous and sub-cutaneous, through 

 their overlying epithelial and epidermal structures respec- 

 tively ; and, in the second instance, by invasion of, or 

 metastasis to, deeper-seated structures and organs by lines 

 of continuity, histological and vascular, and by sepsis of 

 the fluids, lymphatic and sanguineous. Here, moreover, 

 the virus, besides meeting little textural opposition, finds 

 ready to hand for its mal-nutritional purposes quantities 

 of dead and de-vitalised materials in the act of being shed, 

 which meet its immediate wants and supply it with the 

 required opportunity to invade and convert to its increas- 

 ing materio-dynamic demands the elements of the physio- 

 logically living and active tissues. Having effected a 

 footing thus, by introducing into the hitherto normally 

 working sympathetico-systemic formative and nutritive 

 regime the element of materio-dynamic discord and per- 

 version, it finally usurps and takes possession, to the 

 ultimate and entire spoliation and undoing of its host 

 the physiological becoming gradually merged into the 

 pathological, structurally and functionally. 



This finding brings us nearer to the point and manner 

 of origin of the disease, where it seems to make, at any 

 rate, clearer the various factors at work and the parts they 

 respectively take in initiating and continuing the patho- 



