64 THE
ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
explanations
become superfluous. In certain cases in human development, where either no
embryo arises within the chorion, or when the embryo becomes aborted or dies
prior to the suppression of the asexual generation, the latter—the chorion—may
go on growing indefinitely, and may give rise to what pathologists and
gynaecologists recognize to be a form of cancer, placentoma, or
chorio-epithelioma (Marchand). For years now I have recognized, and, in
homologizing this structure with the larval skin of an amphibian, Hubrecht has
gone a long way in the like direction, that the human chorion represents the
main portion or whole of the asexual generation here. In certain cases,
therefore, we here witness the conversion of the chorion—i.e., of the asexual
generation—into a malignant tumour, a carcinoma.
What
other proof could be asked for? That this proof of the nature of cancer is not
in agreement with accepted views of normal development cannot be set down to
the fault of the writer. He holds, and has long maintained, such views to be
false and unfounded in fact, and, moreover, it has been attempted to indicate
the right way. The arguments and conclusions have been neither refuted nor
confirmed, but they have been ignored. But embryologists are living, and have
long been existing therein, in a mental universe, where but a tithe of the
facts observed are explicable under their views. Under the conception of
development as an antithetic alternation of generations—especially as laid down
in “Heredity and the Epicycle of the Germ-Cells “*—all the known facts of
development fit in, all are capable of easy and natural explanation. And the
elucidation of the etiology of carcinoma follows as a natural corollary to the
law of the
* Biologisches
Cenfralblatt, 1902, vol. xxii., pp. 321-328, 353-360, and 398-408.