In no part of the body is the onset of cancer more insidious than in the bowel. As it is a local disease at first and becomes disseminated later on, an essential for successful treatment is early diagnosis, and anything tending to aid in this respect is of great practical advantage to the surgeon. It was formerly thought that carcinoma of all structures occurred in middle or later life, and a strong point in the differential diagnosis between carcinoma and an inflammatory mass, or a benign growth, has been the age of the patient. If the age were 40 years or more the chances seemed to favor cancer; under 40 years the likelihood of carcinoma apparently decreased with decreasing years, till its occurrence in childhood has been looked on as a pathologic curiosity.
Recent reports, however, seem to show that carcinoma of the bowel, and particularly of the appendix, is