pus-organism is either present in the hair-follicle, like the white coccus, or rubbed into it by a finger or finger-nail which has just been sucked in the mouth, used to pick the nose, or possibly engaged in dressing some wound, or cutting meat, or handling fertilizer, then all the materials for an explosion are at hand. CHAPTER XVI CANCER, OR TREASON IN THE BODY-STATE The imagination of the race has ever endowed Cancer with a peculiar individuality of its own. Although it has vaguely personified in darkest ages other diseases, like the Plague, the Pestilence, and _Maya_ (the Smallpox), these have rapidly faded away in even the earliest light of civilization, and have never approached in concreteness and definiteness the malevolent personality of Cancer. Its sudden appearance, the utter absence of any discoverable cause, the twinges of agonizing pain that shoot out from it in all directions, its stone-like hardness in the soft, elastic flesh of the body, the ruthless way in which it eats into and destroys every organ and tissue that come in its way, make this impression, not merely of personality, but of positive malevolence, almost unescapable. Its very name is instinct and bristling with this idea: _Krebs_, in German, _Cancer_, in Latin, French, and English, _Carcinoma_, in Greek, all alike mean "Crab," a ghastly, flesh-eating parasite, gnawing its way into the body. The simile is sufficiently obvious. The hard mass is the body of the beast; the pain of the growth is due to his bite; the hard ridges of scar tissue which radiate in all directions into the surrounding skin are his claws. The singular thing is that, while brushing aside, of course, all these grotesque similes, the most advanced researches of science are developing more and more clearly the conception of the independent individuality--as they term it, the _autonomy_--of cancer. More and more decidedly are they drifting toward the unwelcome conclusion that in cancer we have to deal with a process of revolt of a part of the body against the remainder, "a rebellion of the cells," as an eminent surgeon-philosopher terms it. Unwelcome, because a man's worst foes are "they of his own household." Successful and even invigorating warfare can be waged against enemies without, but a contest with traitors within dulls the spear and paralyzes the arm. Against the frankly foreign epidemic enemies of the race a sturdy and, of late years, a highly successful battle has been fought. We have banished the plague, drawn the teeth of smallpox, riddled the armor of diphtheria, and robbed consumption of half its terrors. In spite of the ravings and gallery-play of the Lombroso school anent "degeneracy," our bills of mortality show a marked diminution in the fatality of almost every important disease of external origin which afflicts humanity.