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As this feeling of apprehension is in many minds quite genuine, it may be well to say briefly, before proceeding further, first, that, if there be any disease which absolutely and almost exclusively depends upon definite peculiarities of structure, it is appendicitis, and that these structural peculiarities of this tiny, cramped tag of the food-canal have existed from the earliest infancy of the race.

It was for a long time a puzzle why every drop of the blood containing food and its products absorbed from the alimentary food-canal had to be carried, often by a most roundabout course, to and through the liver, before it could reach any part of the general system. Here was the largest and most striking organ in the body, and it was as puzzling as it was large.

What, of course, originally made the face the face, and, for the matter of that, the head the head, was the intake opening of the food-canal, the mouth.

To this biology can render a fairly satisfactory answer. It is the remains of one of Mother Nature's experiments with her 'prentice hand upon the mammalian food-tube. As is now generally known, the food-canal in animals was originally a comparatively straight tube, running the length of the body from mouth to anus.

Driesch had given an experimental basis for this theory at an earlier stage, in his experiments on the initial stages of the development of sea-urchins, starfishes, zoophytes, and the like. A Planarian worm cut into pieces developed a new worm of smaller size from each part. A mutilated Pluteus larva developed a new food-canal, and restored the whole typical form.

This was a most natural conclusion in the early days of the disease, since, given a tiny blind pouch with a constricted opening gaping upon the cavity of the food-canal, nothing could be more natural than to suppose that small irritating food remnants or foreign bodies, slipping into it and becoming lodged, would block it and give rise to serious inflammation.

On the other hand, let the digestive juices fail to do their duty properly, or the swarms of bacteria pets which we keep in our food-canals get beyond control; or if for any other reason the tissues be kept from getting their proper supply of nourishment from the food-canal, the state of affairs is quickly revealed in the mouth mirror.