CHAPTER XIII 



ON THE STRUCTURE OF A ROUND-CELLED SARCOMA OF THE 

 HUMAN TESTIS, WITH ITS INTERPRETATION 



THE tumour was removed with the testis of a middle-aged man. 

 It was of oval shape and about 5 inches in its longest diameter, and 

 on section it presented characters common in such growths an 

 alternation of grey and translucent areas with others opaque and 

 yellow. The translucent substance, before it had been hardened, was 

 of sufficient firmness to allow of fairly thin sections being cut with 

 a razor, and it was streaked with red-and-white lines, where blood- 

 vessels and fibrous septa traversed it. This was the active living 

 part of the tumour. The opaque areas were sharply marked off 

 from the translucent substance, and had all the characters of dead 

 (or necrosed) tissue, both to the naked eye and when placed under 

 the microscope after sections had been made and stained. In this 

 necrosed and degenerated part of the tumour all the elements, 

 cellular and fibrous, that I shall refer to below were alike changed 

 in the way in which they reacted to stains, taking up the acid 

 stains (eosin, fuchsin, etc.) in a diffuse and equal manner, without 

 differentiation, and not staining well with the basic stains (haema- 

 toxylin, methyl green, etc.). Though all differentiation of nucleus 

 from cytoplasm in stained sections is lost in these necrosed areas, 

 the constituent elements cells, fibres, etc. remain perfectly dis- 

 tinguishable by form. Another striking feature of these necrosed 

 areas is that they have a very low refractive power. In both these 

 features the necrosed parts (Fig. 41 ; /) contrast with others which 

 I have elsewhere 1 alluded to thus : ' In sections lightly stained with 



1 ' Morbid Growths and Sporozoa,' 1893, p. 71. 

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