o the
cause of one of the most terrible and most threatening of human
maladies--cancer, or malignant disease.

The subject is a vast one. Within the limits of a few pages it cannot
be treated with any approach to the completeness which its importance
demands. The utmost that can now be attempted is the suggestion of
certain lines of research independent of animal experimentation,
which, if carried out with completeness, might lead to results of
incalculable benefit to humankind.

Outside the medical profession there are few who have the faintest
realization of the facts pertaining to malignant disease. One reason
for such ignorance is the lack of any organized system, in the United
States, for recording the annual mortality. Except among barbarous or
semi-civilized people, no such condition exists. When, during the
autumn of 1912, Dr. Bashford, the Director of the Imperial Cancer
Research Fund of England, was invited to lecture in New York, he
confessed that he had tried in vain to obtain American statistics
concerning cancer which might be compared to those of other nations;
they simply did not exist. There are a few states and a few cities
for which mortality records exist, but in some of the principle states
of America there is no official record showing even the total number
of deaths from murder, from accident, or disease. Once in ten years
the Federal Government resents us the mortality report of the census
year, but even here the information is not available until a
considerable period after it is collated. There is, however, one
nation whose official registers for many years have recorded the
mortality from each cause of disease, for either sex, and for each
ten-year period of life. These records have no equal elsewhere, and
are only approached by the mortality records of the Empire of Japan.
The figures concerning cancer upon which we may chiefly depend are
those which pertain to the English people. There can be no doubts but
that the mortality from cancer in America exhibits the same phenomena,
though the rate may be higher.

The first thing to impress the student is the immensity of the tribute
of mortality exacted by this disease, from those in the maturity of
life, and in large measure at the period of greatest usefulness.
During thirty years, from 1881 to 1910 inclusive, there perished in
England and Wales from cancer no less than 703,239 lives. Figures
like these, for the average intelligen