104 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
germ-cells
destined for the sexual organs of the individual. A malignant neoplasm, due to
the spontaneous development of such a retrograde germ-cell, which in the days
of long ago would have given rise to an identical twin, has lost to a greater
or less degree those potentialities, those unconscious memories, which would
have permitted it to complete the full life-cycle of normal development, ending
in the formation of a normal embryo. The memories which it retains condition
the character of the tumour to which it will give rise, and it is these rudimentary
memories, stimulated by its environment in some particular organ, which result
now in a sarcoma, now in a carcinoma, mimicking the structure in which it lies.
This explains why in one development a certain germ-cell will produce an
identical twin, while the corresponding germ-cell in another instance develops
into a monster, or into an embryoma, or into such with a malignant tumour, or
into a mixed and malignant neoplasm, or, lastly, into a simple sarcoma or
carcinoma. All depends upon the amount of unconscious memory retained by those
retrogressive germ-cells, which formerly gave birth lo normal embryos,
identical twins, triplets, etc. Nay, one may safely take a further step in the
like direction. Chorio-epithelioma, a deadly form of cancer in pregnancy,
usually rises in instances where either no embryo has been formed (hydatid
mole), or it has been aborted at the critical period* as a monstrosity. Is it
at all unlikely that here, for some reason or other, either the wrong germ-cell
had developed, or, at any rate, that such a one had early usurped the place of
the developing
* For a full account of the “critical period”
and its peculiarities see J. Beard, “Certain Problems of Vertebrate Embryology,”
1896, and “The Span of Gestation and the Cause of Birth,” 1897, both published
by Gustav Fischer, Jena.