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THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
microscopical preparations of a sacral teratoma from the
Giessen collection, with brain, mouth, trachea, esophagus, stomach, gut, and
large pancreas gland present. The teratomata or embryomata undoubtedly pass
gradually over into the teratoids of the sexual organs, in which, according to
Wilms, along with more or less normal development of embryonic organs, one
encounters in other parts of the tumour riotous pathological growth. While, on
the one hand, the teratoid tumours pass gradually into the highly organized
embryomata, on the other hand, according to Wilms, “we have certainly also in
the testis, as I have already sufficiently emphasized for the mixed tumours of
the kidney and the parotid, all possible transitions, from the most
complicated embryoid forms down to the simple ones.”
The
mixed tumours here referred to by Wilms—the tumours into whose nature and
characters he has carried out such brilliant observations—furnish the key to
the problem of the etiology of the tumours in general. Wilms’s writings upon
the mixed tumours of the kidney, vagina, uterus, mammary gland, and parotid,
are of intense interest, even to the embryologist. To my mind they justify
completely his conclusion that they and the embryomata are of like etiology (loc.
cit., p. 270). In his further attempts to trace their embryological
history one cannot agree with him; for, just as he derives the embryomata from
blastomeres (of the embryo), and not from vagrant germ-cells, so he assigns as
the origin of the mixed tumours “ shunted germs” of later and later periods.
Certain of the vagrant germ-cells, defined later on, amply suffice to account
for the mixed tumours also ; indeed, the basis for these and other
tumours may be found in (1) the actual existence of vagrant and aberrant
germ-cells, and (2) the embryological fact that