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Ninety-five per cent of our body-cells are still aquatic in their habits, and marine at that, and can live only saturated with, and bathed in, warm saline solution. Dry them, or even half-dry them, and they die. Even the pavement-cells coating our skin surfaces are practically dead before they reach the air, and are shed off daily in showers.
All muscles, whatever their size or shape, are made up of little spindle-shaped or strap-shaped cells, or wriggling "body-cells" arranged in bands or strings. The size of a given muscle depends upon the number of cells that it contains. The astonishing variety of movements which muscles can make is due to the fact that they have the power when stirred up, or stimulated, of changing their shape.
In short, cancer-cells are obviously a small, isolated group of the body-cells, which in a ghastly fashion have found the fountain of perpetual youth, and can ride through and over the law-abiding citizens of the body-state with the primitive vigor of the dawn of life.
From this it was clear and evident that the haggard face, the lined face, the over-thin or the over-fat body, phemonena familiar to all of us in men and women who have passed their youth, were due in the main to lack of nourishment of the body-cells by the seminal fluid, with lack of proper functioning of the organs, and resultant lack of proper elimination of waste matter from the system, producing that condition of slowing-down of the machine which is a part of the aging process of the body and mind of man and woman, as seen in all men and all women today.
As breakers of the wall of the hollow square of the body-cells, drawn up to resist the cavalry charges of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and rheumatism, few can be compared in deadliness with the diseases of childhood and "common colds."
Yet we are not without gruesome echoes of this lost power of regeneration in that our whole brood of tumors, including the deadly cancer and sarcoma, are due to a strange resumption, on the part of some little knot of our body-cells, of the power of reproducing themselves or the organ in which they are situated, without any regard to the welfare of the rest of the body.
And all that our body-cells need is a little intelligent encouragement to continue this performance, even upon disease germs; so that we needn't be afraid of being stampeded by sudden attack. The next cheering find was that the worst enemies of the bacillus were our best friends. Sunlight will kill them just as certainly as it will give us new life.
We knew in some crude way that it "made blood," that it prepared the food-products for use by the body-cells, and that it secreted the bile; but this latter secretion had little real digestive value, and the other changes seemed hardly important enough to demand that every drop of the blood coming from the food-tube should pass through this custom-house.
The body, in a historical sense, grew up around the germ-cells, taking over functions a little at a time, until in the higher animals nutrition and other activities and a large part even of the reproductive process itself is carried on by body-cells.
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