According to the Japanese Classification of Gastric Carcinoma, one predominant type should be selected to represent the histology of the carcinoma. The authors investigated the relationship among the histologic variables of primary lesions, metastatic lesions and the outcome of patients. A total of 155 patients with node-positive gastric carcinoma were examined. According to the histologic diversity, histologic grades were assigned from 1 to 4 regardless of the predominant histologic type. A larger number of histologic types composing not the primary lesions, but metastatic lymph nodes, were associated with an increasing frequency of advanced stage tumors. On the prognosis by number of histologic types composing the primary tumor and the metastatic lymph nodes, there were significant differences except between the histologic type-2 and histologic type-3 groups in the only metastatic lymph nodes. In conclusion, patients with a greater number of histologic types composing lymph node metastases had poorer prognosis than with a small number of histologic types. Histologic diversity within metastatic lymph node was thought to be important for determining the prognosis of patients with gastric cancer.