Although knowledge of principles determining variation is imperfect, some progress has been made and further help may be obtained from some of the newer conceptions about combining affinities regulating normal growth. There are reasons to believe that growth depends on a rhythmic cycle of synthesis, peculiar to living protein, whereby at each successive stage one particular “building stone” is selected for synthesis, with rejection of all others. There is also some evidence that the surface of a growing bacterium passes through periodic phases. Additional light on the activities of the bacterial surface is thrown by the new conception of enzymes which regards them not as fixed chemical entities but as chemico-physical “centres of activity.”

Some of the principles which are gradually coming to light in bacterial variation may ultimately be of assistance in the much more obscure problem of explaining the change from the normal mammalian cell to its malignant variant. I refer in particular to conceptions, which I have discussed in the preceding part of this article, about the mechanism of cellular growth and the nature of a cell's combining affinities.