Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/14

10 more matured tissues in which a new growth finds itself—the old hands, so to speak—may possibly exercise a very effective restraint upon the young bloods, and thus preserve the ordered going of the locality, by the drastic method of starving the newcomers out.

As one thought on these things, who could do otherwise than peer into the future? And doing so, I wrote, thirty-seven years ago, “What a subject for Darwin would be the cells of a cancer, if only they were tangible, if only we could observe the variations of tumours, under judicious cultivation.”

I have often said during these many years of search for an exogenous germ of cancer that I shall be disappointed if we find one, for malignancy, it may be only upon adequate environic invitation, already finds and fills its place as a sine qua non of evolution.

One likened the position then to that of the chemist who, putting together his scheme of elements, finds bits of his puzzle wanting, but, knowing what their form should be, proceeds to look for them, finds them, and fits them in, the whole one purpose and one picture.

And thus regarding Nature, is there anything improbable in such a pathology of morbid growths? Is there not, in the natural order of things, if so I may speak of what in the empire of the corpus becomes disorder, a place ready for it, a chance that such a thing may come? Are we wrong to expect that if a complex body is possessed of energy, or many centres of energy, for orderly growth and development, that this disposition