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     248                                 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

the American Commission might say, the nature of cancer as an irresponsible asexual generation or tropho­blast had been known for two and a hall years. The speaker proceeded to give an account of his own work upon the history and origin of the germ-cells, from which it had been established beyond question that these were pre-embryonic in origin, arising upon an asexual founda­tion or trophoblast, and that by the self-sacrifice of one an embryo was unfolded to contain and to nourish the other germ-cells for a certain brief span of time. In every case examined it had been found that a varying percentage of the germ-cells failed to reach the right place in the body, and these might be found in almost any organ or position. At first sight it had seemed that any one of these might later on give rise to a tumour, benign or malignant, for they represented, in fact, the “ lost germs” of the pathologists. The speaker’s earlier work upon the life-cycle, published between 1894 and 1898, was next briefly described. These researches had estab­lished that, prior to the appearance of an embryo or sexual form, there arose an asexual foundation—the trophoblast—upon which the germ-cells and embryo came into being. In any normal case, at a certain definite period, the embryo was able to suppress the asexual foundation, and the latter slowly degenerated. If how­ever, the embryo were absent or very abnormal, the trophoblast might, and often did, become a very deadly form of cancer—chorio-epithelioma. The two generations had different nutritions—a fact of extreme importance— and the “digestion” of a cancer resembled that of the trophoblast of normal development. An account was then given of the speaker’s conclusions as to the origin of tumours, and their relation to identical twins, triplets, etc. It was shown that each such identical twin, triplet, etc., was due to the independent development of a single germ-cell, and not, as was commonly held, to the splitting of a “ germ.” Slides of the two sorts of identical twins— those “ from the same mould,” and those rarer “looking-

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