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The presence of distinct body-cells is not peculiar to mammals, but there is one respect in which these latter are quite different from non-mammals: A mammalian individual, beginning like a non-mammal with a fertilized egg, has a period of intra-maternal development which a non-mammal has not. Here in a nutshell is the biological basis of sex problem in human society.
And, while it is an immensely difficult and complicated subject, we are justified in saying that this immunity is not merely a substance formed in the body, the stock of which will shortly become exhausted, but a faculty acquired by the body-cells, which they will retain, like other results of education, for years, and even for life.
We are beginning to find that these last two groups will bear watching. Like camp-followers elsewhere, they carry knives, and are not above using them on the wounded after dark. In fact, they have a cheerful habit of taking a hand in any disturbance that starts in their bailiwick, and usually on the side against the body-cells.
This is not by any means to say that there is no causative organism, and that this will not some day be discovered. Human knowledge is a blind and short-sighted thing at best, and it may be that some invading cell, which, from its very similarity to the body-cells, has escaped our search, will one day be discovered.
It is just as impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die and are recreated.
Cancer is, in one sense, a throwing off of the allegiance to the body-state and a resumption of amphibian powers of independent growth on the part of certain groups of our body-cells literally, a "rebellion of the cells."
So close and fine is this network in the skin, for instance, that, as you can readily prove, it is impossible to thrust the point of the finest needle through the skin without piercing one of them and "drawing blood," as we say, or making it bleed. From this network of tiny, thin-walled tubes, the body-cells draw their food from the blood. The Meaning of Good Color.
In cancer, on the contrary, the destroying organism is a group of perverted body-cells. The invasion of other parts of the body is carried out by transference of their bastard and abortive offspring.
Primarily all our body-cells had the power of responding to stimuli, of digesting and elaborating food, of moving by contraction, of reproducing their kind. The nerve-cells are simply a group which have specialized exclusively upon the power of receiving and transmitting impulses.
The great fundamental difference between cancer and any infection lies in the fact that, in an infection, the inflammations and poisonings and local swellings are due solely and invariably to the presence and multiplication of the invading germs, which may be recovered in millions from every organ and region affected, while swellings or new masses produced are merely the outpouring of the body-cells in an attempt to attack and overwhelm these invaders.
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