"Pathologists will limit the area of the process to the province of functional diseases, but we are not sure that we are justified by scientific facts in making this limitation. It is a fact in pathology that if the functions of an organ be maintained or restored, much of the destructive metamorphoses may be arrested and to some extent repaired.'

To extend our philosophy, men and women may keep themselves young as well as free from disease, by preserving a cheerful attitude as the

years roll on. The panacea against age-changes is a happy persistence in activity, not for mere self-gratification, not for mere time-killing, but rather professional activity which implies service of brain and muscle in the interest of fellowbeings. Wrote the poet of "Aurora Leigh":

Work man, work woman, since there's work to do
In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart.

The occupation cure offers employments that agreeably divert the self-centered mind, and involves exercise that physiologically disposes of an intelligently selected and limited dietary. With the mind solidly set, either of itself or by suggestions offered at the proper intervals, against the functional changes in the brain, nervous, and circulatory systems that precede the anatomical changes incident to advanced years,

a physiological old age may be assured. Through "the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes," nutritional processes are kept up, organs and tissues forget to degenerate, harmonious interrelations prevail among the ductless glands, the lessened vital resistance with its defective elimination and premature incompetency is staved off, and euthanasia (painless dying) closes the happy scene. In the words of Dr. Saleeby, a London specialist:

"If your arteries are soft, if you still believe in life and love and friendship and the future, it does not matter how old your body may be; you are still young, for your soul is soul is young, and

youth is a state of the soul.”

Naturally, all this is contingent upon a normally lived youth and middle age. It is well known to physicians that a common victim of nephritis, for instance, is the man apparently robust, who labors all day long in the sedentary employments of an office life, lays a heavy strain on his liver and kidneys by overloading his stomach three times a day, takes little exercise, and so fails to dispose of an abnormal quantity of waste. Big eaters age early. Those who love the tooth dig their graves with that tooth. Through the immediate action on the vascular system of irritant poisons formed in the intestines overeating creates hypertension, and this is the

unambiguous cause of arterial hardening which may reach a climax in apoplexy, or by overtaxing the heart induce cardiac or renal disease. Insurance companies fully apprehend that longevity is indeed a vascular question, and so require a searching inquiry into the vascular status of the man who applies for a policy.

The automobile and other means of easy and rapid tranist which the pressure of vocational and social obligations demands in this day, has stolen from our business men their opportunity for exercise that a necessity for walking so freely offers; and well-to-do women have essentially given up the practice and are whirled from place to place in their cars. The automobile habit is thus breaking down constitutions where the earlier bicycle habit upbuilt them. It has crept into the country districts also; and rural dwellers are affecting it, making no difference in their dietary of heavy proteid foods, and depriving themselves further of health-giving exercise by relegating to farm machinery the manual labor that formerly enabled them properly to digest and to eliminate.

It is doubtless true that American vitality is gradually lowering, partly through defective pre-natal development, and that there are more deaths than formerly between forty and fifty years from the degenerative disorders of mature

life-apoplexy, cardiorenal, and circulatory diseases, and cancer, the latter often due directly to emotional overstrain and to passions like hate. The increased death-rate during the last twenty years (from twenty-seven to thirty-eight per 10,000), which is rightfully attracting the attention of our insurance companies, cannot be laid to general causes, but rather to habits of living that have developed with the refinements of civilization-notably the excessive consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and protein fare, and the lack of active exercise properly to oxidize the food and carry off the accumulated poisons. Now, as intestinal poisoning is due to erroneous diet, it is fair to assume that over and improper indulgence at table explains the abnormally high arterial tension in the majority of these applicants for insurance.

There is no reason why men should retire at fifty-seven or fifty-eight, and die of rust in the sixties. They should be as intellectually active and as physically handsome at eighty as at thirty, and vastly more capable. Those who know and practise the true principles of living are so today. The acceptance for generations of the limit of human life prescribed in Psalm xc-"The days of our years are threescore years and ten❞— has begotten in the human mind a massive conviction, subtly radiated throughout the habi

table globe, that life is naturally bounded by this age. For three thousand years men have been taught to expect death at seventy to seventy-five, and therefore they die at this time. But many have awakened to a new understanding that it is not necessary to stop at the old arbitrary limit. Not a few are professionally active in the nineties, and it is confidently believed that the century mark will be attained in the future by the mass of persons who take proper care of themselves.

It is reported that in Bulgaria, where careful observations have been made, there are more than five thousand centenarians whose ripe years are justly attributed to the milk products that constitute the national menu, and to the life simple which the people lead in the open air, together with its freedom from worry and anxiety.

The true way of prolonging life is to stop thinking and doing the things that shorten it; rather let us saturate the mind with those "divine ideas which find us young and always keep us so.' In the words of Professor Louis F. Bishop of Fordham University, "The life of a brain-worker should consist of forty years of preparation and at least forty years of fruitful labor." Such general extension of life, which is far from icarian, would mean incalculable additions to the