160 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
foodstuffs
of an animal—a man, for example. But, as the asexual mode of reproduction,
whether
of
a plant or of a cancer, is the more prolific one, there has been, hitherto at
all events, no failure
on
the part of the asexual generations of plants to furnish ultimately the
foodstuffs of animals. The conditions met with in animals are reversed in
plants. Here a laevo-cellulose, a laevo-sugar,
a
laevo-starch, and one or more dextro-albumins must be sought for, not in the
asexual generation as in animals, but in the sexual one, as represented by, for
example, the fern prothahlus. “Science is prevision,” said Pasteur. Because of
the truth of this one is able to set up the following table of
comparisons:
|
ANIMAL. |
|
|
Sexual generation or individual. |
Asexual generation. tropho-blast, or cancer. |
|
Laevo-albumins, not acted upon when living by trypsin and amylopsin,
but attacked in life and pulled down by the cancer-ferment, malignin. |
Dextro-albumins, not acted upon when living by their own intracellular
ferment, malignin. but attacked in life by trypsin and amylopsin. |
|
Dextro-sugars. |
Laevo-sugar |
|
Dextro-glycogen. |
Laevo-glycogen. |
|
Pigment melanin. |
Pigment not melanin (in melanosarcoma), Blumenthal. |
|
PLANT. |
|
|
Asexual generation (flowering plant or fern) |
Sexual generation (fern prothallus). |
|
Laevo-albumins. |
Dextro-albumin. |
|
Dextro-starch. |
Laevo-starch. |
|
Dextro-sugars. |
Laevo-sugars. |
It would be interesting, were sufficient information
available, to inquire into the conditions met with in bacteria and fungi. These
are fundamentally neither animals nor plants. So far as the facts are known
regarding their compounds and their ferments, some of them