th the fact that they produce local enlargement.

They are noninflammatory; that is, the process of inflammation is not
directly the cause or accompaniment of them. An inflammatory new growth
tends to disappear upon the subsidence of the inflammatory process, while
spontaneous disappearance of a tumor is comparatively rare.

Tumors are independent. For instance, their nutrition bears no relation to
the nutrition of the body. A lipoma, or fatty tumor, in the subcutaneous
tissue, may go on increasing to huge bulk while the body is steadily
emaciating. Again, the tissues of the aged gradually undergo atrophy, yet
cancers arise at this time and grow rapidly.

Tumors are unrestrained in growth and structure. In the development of an
animal we know at what period of its existence the mass of tissue called
liver will develop--what its site, structure, and size will be. We know
that it will remain only in that locality, and not, as it were, colonize
throughout the system. With tumors it is different; there are no laws by
which we can forecast the time, place, nature, or size of development of
them. There is no cartilage in the kidney or parotid gland, yet a
chondroma, or cartilage tumor, may develop in either. Even when a new
growth of tissue is started by an injury and consequent inflammation--as,
for instance, proud flesh--there is a limitation of its size, but the
controlling influences which govern the size of an organ or normal mass of
tissue and limit the extent of an inflammatory overgrowth are all absent in
the case of tumors. They are unrestrained, lawless.

Metastasis expresses the lawlessness of tumors as regards being limited to
the original site of development. Small particles of tumors enter the blood
vessels or lymph streams and are carried to distant parts of the body,
where they lodge and start new tumor formations. Expansion by colonization
in this manner is a rule with many tumors, and, since they exercise no
function of use to the organism, this dissemination of actively growing
particles becomes a menace to the system by numerically increasing the
body's burden, opening new channels of drain upon the system and adding new
centers for the absorption of putrefactive materials when the secondary
tumors shall have degenerated. It is this which makes metastasis such an
important element in the malignancy of tumors.

Tumors possess no physiological function. They are absolutely useless.
Fibrous tumors bind n