Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/16

12 I should call the difference one of degree of vigour of growth, rather than of kind. Exuberant energy will out.

Think of the fact that X rays so stimulate the surfaces as to lead in the first instance to an excitement and proliferation of the superficial cells of the skin, and then too often to cancer. A most vital acquisition this to our knowledge. An obvious signpost—not too distinct—upon the road we are travelling.

Here life from two worlds is perhaps forming into line, and as in the one, so in the other, say by some direct inducement to the cell, or adaptive alteration of the nutrient juices—photo- or chemo-synthetic in kind, maybe—an intensive cultivation is brought about, one may even suggest that the equivalent of a top mulch is applied.

Thus I see in cancer a home-grown weed, or a prodigal son maybe, alas! by no means yet worthy of the fatted calf, and in my study I seem to light upon the fundamentals of eugenics, and, indeed, to hark back to their earliest dawn.

But, however this may be, the trend of all recent work carried out by that splendid Imperial Cancer Research Fund realizes the dream of the bygone pathologist, for a large part of the monumental labours of Dr. Bashford and his fellow-workers during the last ten years, although showing that exogenesis is possible, and defining its limitations, has gone to point the fundamental necessity of the study of the life-history of the individual cancer cell, and, as you know, this has now been done and followed up in short-lived animals (the mouse), where alone it is possible, the results seeming to show, not that the environment, but