476 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



disposing of, or excreting, the crumbling and effete 

 materials as they become devitalised, imprisons and 

 retains them, thereby producing, or allowing to form, 

 a pathological nidus for " new formations," from which 

 dead or diseased materials are allowed to leak and well 

 into the neighbouring functionally active body textures 

 at large, to the detriment of the health, and finally to the 

 death of the individual. That this can occur, in indi- 

 viduals of impaired, or originally low, vital resistance, with 

 special readiness, is only too evident, and we hold that it 

 explains the doctrine of the hereditary transmission of 

 cancer, as well as some other reputed hereditary diseases, 

 these hereditarily disposed individuals never manifesting 

 symptoms of such diseases until their organisms become 

 encumbered with functionless and perishing textures, with 

 the removal of which their absorbing and excretory 

 agencies are unable to deal a feeble power of disease 

 resistance, and insufficient ability to cope with tissue 

 waste, being the inherited peculiarities on which these 

 diseased conditions and pathological sequences of events 

 depend for their origin and development. 



The perishing remains of functionless and katabolic 

 textures, must, therefore, be regarded as forming the 

 originating and foundation physiologico-pathological basis, 

 or matrix, on, and in which, the pathogenic agencies begin 

 their malign work, and from which they attack and 

 destroy the neighbouring healthy structures, making them 

 " part and parcel " of their own malignant developments 

 and textures ; the nature and structural characteristics of 

 these developments being necessarily coloured and de- 

 termined by the organic materials on which they feed, 

 and from which they are evolved and developed by the 

 usurping pathological formative agencies and forces no 

 doubt dictated, or determined, so to speak, by the formerly 

 prevailing physiological regime. 



The principle and working of the physiologico-pathological 

 process, or succession, of evolutionary and involutionary 

 events in the life history of plants and animals alike has 

 long been observed and studied, and is, or, we may say, 

 ought to be, now recognised as a universal law, by the 

 operation of which nature arranges and accomplishes her 



