74 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
serious
tamperings with the development, as Wilms’s theories demand. Nor should it be
forgotten that, while on the one hand Wilms speaks of an embryonic “overproduction
“ (!), he states that the germs of his tumours develop in exactly those organs
to whose edifice under normal circumstances they ought to have contributed.
Underlying
the doctrine of the shunted germs are the dogmas of epigenesis and somatic
origin of germ-cells. The latter is an absolute necessity to the former. Since
the founder of this (Professor Waldeyer) has seen reason to reject his former
conclusions in favour of a morphological continuity of germ-cells, the
greatest stronghold of epigenesis has fallen.* Brilliant as are Wilms’s actual
investigations of the tumours, when regarded from the objective embryological
standpoint, the “shunted germs,” evoked to account for the facts, are just as
hypothetical and chimerical as any other “lost germs” ever conceived of by
pathologists.
Wilms’s
theory, ingenious and enticing though it be, is but a clearer defined
modification of that of embryonic rests. As with the latter, epigenesis and
hypothesis are its main bases; and as to the Remak-Cohnheim theory, the
objection can be urged that it is an unnecessary multiplication of causes.
This is well illustrated by Wilms’s and Borst’s distinctions of monogerminal
and bigerminal tumours. Double monsters and certain teratomata are regarded as
bigerminal, and, placed in contrast
* See Waldeyer, W. “Die Geschlechtszellen,”
Abdruck aus dem “ Handbuch der vergleichenden und experimentellen Entwickelungsgeschichte
der Wirbeltiere” von Dr. Oscar Hertwig, vol. 1., 1903, pp. 404-405. With
the “prevision,” of which Pasteur so often spoke, on p. 405 Waldeyer writes:
Die” Folgerungen aus dieser Lehre von der Kontinuität der Geschlechtszellen
sind fast unabsehbar für die gesamte Biologie” (The consequences of this
doctrine of the continuity of germ-cells are almost incalculable for every
branch of Biology).