23. No single remedy for cancer has been, or will probably ever be, discovered, since it is conceded that there is no single cause for the disease. The history of cancer abounds in the heralding of various vaunted remedies, quack and other, including sera, whose employment has only ended in the disappointment of medical men and in the deluded hopes of innumerable sufferers. 24. Modern surgery has materially improved the statistics relating to the immediate results of operative procedures; but the total achievements along this line are insignificant when compared with the steadily rising death rate, and ultimate mortality of about 90 per cent of those once afflicted with cancer. 25. Surgery has had, and may yet have, its function to perform in removing some of the _products_ of the constitutional state causing cancer, more or less efficiently, curing some patients and prolonging the life of others; but from past experience it can never hope to lessen the morbidity of cancer. The reason for this is that it attacks a symptom only, and not the underlying cause. 26. The X-ray and radium, as also caustics, are in the same position as surgery, and can do little more than cause to disappear, more or less temporarily, some of the lesions which have developed from causes which they cannot reach. 27. With all these means the measure of success, aside from the technical skill of the operator, depends largely on the duration and the extent of development of the malignant growth before treatment: the earlier such local treatment is undertaken, other things being equal, the greater the possibilities of success. 28. The same is true in regard to the treatment of cancer by dietary and medical means. The earlier the morbid constitutional process, or state, leading to tumor formation is attacked by proper dietetic, hygienic, and medicinal measures, the greater the promise and expectation of success, present and permanent. 29. The cure and prevention of cancer, therefore, and the checking of its increasing occurrence and mortality, depend largely upon the early adoption of such measures as will limit the agencies which induce the formation of the new growth: these are certain derangements of the body juices which tend to bad nutrition and disturbance of the action of the body cells. 30. The simple life, with the avoidance of the dietetic and other causes which have been found to induce cancer in nations and individuals, promises the best hope for the arrest of its rapidly increasing development and mortality throughout the world. 31. It is more than possible, however, that the long continued operation of many baneful causes has produced such a degeneration of tissue in the human race that it will take a generation or more of proper living to make the beneficial impression on the general occurrence and mortality of cancer which is so longed for.