Becker and Obermayer

 
"When arising from normal skin, a macule [of malignant melanoma] appears which is at first brownish, but soon becomes darker in color and later changes into a nodule. The lesion grows to form a tumor which is often lobulated." (Fig. 1)
 
Becker SW, Obermayer ME. Modern Dermatology and Syphilology. 2nd Edition. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1947:706.

View Figure  		Fig. 1  Our diagnosis and comment: Melanoma. This melanoma, characterized by a notched border and an uneven surface, is a nodule and, therefore, is nearer to being 10 years old, rather than to being of "one year's duration."
 

Brief critique

 
Becker and Obermayer rightly understood that, for practical purposes, all primary cutaneous melanomas begin as a "brownish" macule, but they fail to communicate that only very gradually does it become "darker in color" and only very slowly, over the course of years, does it evolve into a patch, a papule, or a papule on a patch. Never does a macule, which is the clinical analogue of melanoma in situ, develop directly into a nodule, that is, the so-called vertical growth phase that Clark claimed was characteristic from the outset of "nodular melanoma." By the time that a nodule of melanoma has formed, the melanomatous process usually has been underway for about a decade.