338 CONSERVATION AND CORRELATION OF VITAL FORCE. 
thus showing that its frequency is more than twenty-five times as 
great between seventy and eighty years as at ten years of age. 
Does it not seem as though the still unused strength, lacking 
in these declining years a legitimate employment, were engaging 
in the development of a low grade of cells whose vitality was 
insufficient for their own stability? This however is but a poor 
hypothesis to account for a well proved fact. 
Be all this as it may, however, of this there is no doubt :— that 
after the removal of an external, malignant growth at an advanced 
stage of development, the chances of disease of the same character 
attacking an internal organ are greatly increased: hence prolon- 
gation of life is seldom gained by a surgical operation.* 
Mr. John Simon gives an explanation of some of these facts I 
have derived from medical literature. I quote him, as they pos- 
sibly may have a wider application. ‘‘ But besides this antagonism 
effected through the general circulation, there probably are antag- 
onisms of a local character; and parts which are respectively 
supplied by different contiguously-rising branches of one arterial 
trunk seem specially able thus to antagonize each other. For 
assuming the flow through an arterial trunk to remain the same, 
one branch, or set of branches can only transmit more blood, if, 
simultaneously, another branch or set of branches transmit less; 
and we may well conceive it to be an important function of vasi- 
motor nerves to provide for the adjustment of this antagonism, by 
establishing such inter-arterial sympathies that the relative opening 
of one branch shall determine the relative closure of another.” t 
If not too mechanical and in contravention of vasi-motor function, 
I would venture to suggest that the relative closure of one branch 
might determine the opening ‘of another, by forcing more blood 
through the latter. This would only account for those instances 
of the organic balance in which the plus and minus were in 
organs supplied from the same arterial trunk, i.e., anatomical rela- 
tives. On the next page however the same author takes a more 
comprehensive view of his subject and says :—*“ Textural excitabil- 
ity perhaps is not so exclusively local but that in this respect also 
these may be conditions of inter-textural balance ; the total excita- 
Se a 
*I am gery of the pee. of Bsc regarding the removal of cancerous 
growths, but as they are s variance “in the endli sia of the mass of 
surgeons, I ‘ara not regard shied Bi as nAn denn statements. 
į Holmes’ Surgery, 2d edition, Vol. i, p. 80. 
