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    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.

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