560 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



Visceral and textural limitations, or boundaries, and 

 fibro-muscular attachments forming inter-textural frontiers, 

 or boundary lines, of compoundly innervated elements, 

 lend themselves to circulatory disturbances and stases, and 

 so afford " backwater eddies " of debatable plasma and of 

 questionable character, so to speak, in which the dynamic 

 and material factors of disease are allowed, it may be, a 

 momentary and precarious footing, but in which, if the 

 tone of physiological health, local or general, happens to 

 be lowered, that footing may be sufficient to allow of a 

 beginning in the process of pathogenesis and the evolution 

 of definite disease ; the character of which latter will be 

 regulated by the factors in operation and the structural 

 elements involved, so-called functional disease being from 

 this point of view an impossibility the truth of which 

 statement, were we possessed of sufficientlv effective means 

 of observation, would necessarily be discovered and made 

 available for practical materio-dynamic purposes. Disease 

 is thus the outcome of abnormal dynamic and material 

 agencies, working primarily along normal, or physiological, 

 lines, and the expression in new forms of growth of the 

 results of determinate formative materio-dynamic activity, 

 ^ach new form taking on the character of the predominant 

 physiological factor or factors, and local structural condi- 

 tions, material and dynamic ; thus, neuroma is the outcome 

 of a stasis of neural circulation and accumulation or growth, 

 and indicates quasi-organisation of the axonal fibre medul- 

 lary material within the peri-neural sheaths, while true 

 sarcoma is due to a stasis and new formative arrangement 

 of the elements of muscular tissue within the structural 

 limits of conformable textures, and so with the other 

 varieties of new growth. 



