ement of the process is usually somewhat upon this order: After
forty, fifty, or even sixty years of loyal service, the cells lining one
of the tubules of a gland--for instance, of the lip, or tongue, or
stomach--begin to grow and increase in number. Soon they block up the
gland-tube, then begin to push out in the form of finger-or root-like
columns of cells into the surrounding tissues.

These columns appear to have the curious power of either turning their
natural digestive ferments against the surrounding tissues, or secreting
new ferments for the purpose, closely resembling pepsin, and thus
literally eating their way into them. So rapidly do these cells continue
to breed and grow and spread resistlessly in every direction, that soon
the entire gland, and next the neighboring tissues, become packed and
swollen, so that a hard lump is formed, the pressure upon the
nerve-trunks gives rise to shooting pains, and the first act of the
drama is complete.

But these new columns and masses, like most other results of such rapid
cell-breeding in the body, are literally a mushroom growth. Scarcely are
they formed before they begin to break down, with various results. If
they lie near a surface, either external or internal, they crumble under
the slightest pressure or irritation, and an ulcer is formed, which may
either spread slowly over the surface, from the size of a shilling to
that of a dinner-plate, or deepen so rapidly as to destroy the entire
organ, or perforate a blood-vessel and cause death by hemorrhage. The
cancer is breaking down in its centre, while it continues to grow and
spread at its edge. Truly a "magnificent scheme of decay."

Then comes the last and strangest act of this weird tragedy. In the
course of the resistless onward march of these rebel cell-columns some
of their skirmishers push through the wall of a lymph-channel, or even,
by some rare chance, a vein, and are swept away by the stream. Surely
now the regular leucocyte cavalry have them at their mercy, and can cut
them down at leisure. We little realize the fiendish resourcefulness of
the cancer-cell. One such adrift in the body is like a ferret in a
rabbit warren; no other cell can face it for an instant. It simply
floats unmolested along the lymph-channels until its progress is
arrested in some way, when it promptly settles down wherever it may
happen to have landed, begins to multiply and push out columns in every
direction, into and at the exp