Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/15

Rh or force will now and then slip its leash and run off on its own? An analogy of this kind seems to me to convey a workable conception of a scheme of malignancy, where ordered growth diverges by successive steps of variation, of indulgence of function, until cancer appears, until malignancy becomes the insanity, shall I say? of function. And does not an idea of this kind foreshadow, and father too, the modern doctrine of the individuality of protoplasm, which I take to be taught by cell eating (phagocytosis) and other forms of irritative response of which now we hear and think so much?

The last effort of the friend of many here, the late Sir Henry Butlin, who was at work with us in the days that I recall, embodying as it did the results of thirty-five years of research and thought in this very region, surely all pointed to some such conclusion in his mind, for although his introduction of the term “parasite” is liable to misinterpretation, the parasite cell was no other than some derivative of a protoplasmic human cell, and thus was parasitic, if at all, only in behaviour, to which the highest organisms must plead guilty—for are we not all of us at one time or another sponges on the world we live in? And regarding the living animal from the point of individualistic protoplasm, are some of the sports of our gardens so utterly divergent genetically from tumours of natural tissue; from the infective granulomata; or from the growth of a cancer?