for a number of years, perhaps with this hypothesis in view, the Registrar-General in England has tabulated all deaths from cancer of either sex, not only by different age-periods, but also by the part of the body affected by the fatal disease. A study of the facts thus made known is extremely suggestive. It is true that a marked increase in the death-rate has occurred in cancer affecting internal organs, as we should naturally suppose; but it is also true that malignant disease affecting parts of the body where little or no doubt of the character of the ailment could be entertained by the physician, exhibit in some instances as marked an increase in the death-rate as in some other cases, where doubt of malignancy might be justifiable. For example, cancer of the tongue among men showed a death-rate of 32 per million population in 1897; it went up to 47 per million in 1910-- an increase of nearly 50 per cent. Cancer of the female breast showed a death-rate of about 142 per million population in 1897; it had arisen to a rate of 190 per million only thirteen years later; and here, assuredly, the nature of the disease in fatal cases cannot be mistaken.[1] Cancer of the stomach in its final stages does not present insuperable difficulties in way of diagnosis, but the death-rate increased for men about 40 per cent. in fifteen years; and although some of this increase may be due to more careful discrimination between cases of malignant disease affecting the liver, yet this explanation cannot account for the increase when both organs are considered together. The subject is worthy of careful and extended investigation, but even a cursory examination of the facts now available indicate a real increase in the death-rate from cancer in England, and probably in every other civilized country in the world. [1] "During fourteen years ... the mortality from mammary cancer has increased by about 29 per cent., NOTWITHSTANDING LIVES SAVED BY IMPROVED METHODS OF OPERATION."--Registrar-General's Report for 1910, p. 69. But all these phenomena are of secondary importance compared with the great problem of medical science--the yet undiscovered cause of malignant disease. During recent years the study of cancer has been conducted with scientific enthusiasm in many laboratories. Vast sums of money have been given, in the hope that these studies may one day lead to the discovery of a cure. One whom I knew in his youth became the heir of great wealth; lived to see one whom he loved perish from the disease; was struck down himself, and dying, left a fortune for the purpose of promoting research concerning cancer. And yet to-day the problem, as attacked in the various laboratories of Europe and America, is apparently as far from solution as it was forty years ago. Sir Henry Butlin, ex-President of the Royal College of Surgeons, England, is said to have operated on as many cases of cancer as any surgeon of his day. Yet, speaking in October, 1911, he said: