TYPE OF MOKBID GROWTH. 109 



destiny from their situation. It is wrong, however, and pre- 

 judicial to the advance of real knowledge, when we allow the 

 study and description of those features which are common to new 

 growths in different organs to blind us to the right of each indi- 

 vidual organ to have a morbid growth viewed as a disturbance of 

 its own proper development — of its nutrition or of its degeneration. 

 I must not be understood to question the utility, nay, the neces- 

 sity of generalisations on the subject of morbid growth ; but 

 such generalisations ought rather to tend towards establishino- 

 the principles of development than towards the discovery of 

 definite anatomical patterns on which any morbid growth — e.g. 

 cancer — is constructed, in whatever organ it may occur. If I 

 understand the times aright, men are weary of mere anatomical 

 classifications based exclusively on outward characters. They 

 w^ill agree with me in tliinking that the system has been brought 

 into utter discredit by the inexhaustible variety of concrete forms. 

 Henceforward therefore, while retaining the terms cancer, sar- 

 coma, and so forth, and endeavouring to sketch in broad outlines 

 the laws of their development and growth, without omittino- to 

 take their influence on the organism as a whole into account, 

 we will always fall back upon the description of the individual 

 forms in the Special Part of this work, and keep alive to the fact 

 that a knowledge of these concrete forms is at least as important 

 for the practitioner as a correct appreciation of those general 

 features which they possess in common. 



§ 87. Having done with this digression, let us resume the 

 thread of our discourse, by seeking the cause of every deviation 

 from the rule of normal growth — the cause of heteroplasia — in 

 an over-activity of one or other of the two factors which co- 

 operate in the growth of organs. The intermediate apparatus of 

 nutrition has the first claim on our attention. Many products of 

 morbid growth originate from this alone — e.g. interstitial inflam- 

 mation, tumours made up of granulation-tissue, sarcomata. In 

 a second series, the epithelium steps in to rival the conjoint blood- 

 vascular and connective-tissue system, and we have many oppor- 

 tunities of testing the accuracy of our views of epithelial growth 

 in the caricatures of it (Zerrbildern) presented by the ^-arious 

 forms of carcinoma. It cannot be denied that this division of 

 labour is prefigured in the physiological relation of the two 

 systems to one another (as summarised in § 84). I cannot 



