a man rises whole and renewed in every limb; the past illness may no more cripple his future life than does the labourer's Saturday night's fatigue unfit him for Monday's work. In many a life sickness and disease come and go without leaving a trace behind them, and often those who seemed in their early days so frail that a mere touch might lay them low, are seen to gather strength as they increase in years, and to ripen into a stout old age. In fact, as a general rule, the power of resisting disease, so far from lessening, actually grows with the growing frame; and throughout the whole of life a man's vital condition at any one time is much more dependent on the events of the few preceding days or months than on all that has been undergone during the, it may be, long years before. And if we attempt to seize hold of any other test of vital capacity we shall equally fail. Nowhere shall we find any safe evidence that the allotted span of years is governed by the supposed amount of vital force imparted at birth.

Nevertheless, we shall be forced to admit that length of days is fixed by something more than the mere wear and tear, by something deeper than, and lying beyond, the mere outward circumstances of life; something fixed in, and peculiar to, the organism itself. How else is it that different kinds of animals have lives of a different average length? The histories of a horse, a man, and an elephant, give us no clue to finding out how it is that one lives to twenty, another to seventy, and the third to over a hundred years. Doubtless there are causes for these differences, but they lie at present hid from us, deep in the organisms along with the other mysteries of life. The very best of our knowledge concerning the nature of old age is but a mere scratching of the surface. We cannot as yet hope to taste the meat of science; we can only look through the window, rub the glass, and see what is prepared; perhaps we shall never be able to do any more.

How inward and radical are the elements of decay may also be seen when we consider that the decline of life in man does not in reality begin at somewhat about forty or fifty years, but may be traced back even to infancy itself. If we take the rate of growth as the measure of vital strength, we shall find ourselves forced to admit that life is on the wane even in the earliest periods of existence. Of course it is not denied that the amount of living stuff yearly added to the frame in youth is absolutely far greater than the amount yearly added to the frame n infancy; the bulk and weight of flesh and bone which a growing boy puts on between Midsummer and Christmas could only be rivalled by a company of babies, and a father may lose or gain in a few months the weight of one of his children. But it must be remembered that in the boy and in the man, while

there is more work of growth done, there is also more living stuff already at hand to do the work; that while the total increase is greater, the amount gathered by each inch or ounce of the body is less than in the child. A few pounds more flesh and blood are nothing to a man, and not much to a boy, but they are enough almost to double the weight of a babe, and their acquirement bespeaks in the latter case a much greater vital activity. If we wish to make growth a true measure of vital power, we must calculate not by the time it takes the body to put on so many pounds, but by the time during which the whole frame doubles or trebles its weight. And in so doing we shall find that, though an animal keeps getting bigger and bigger from birth to adolescence, its power to grow keeps getting less and less, the rate of growth gradually diminishes. It is at the very outset of existence that the work of increase is busiest, that life is strongest; thenceforward there is in reality nothing but a decline, whose vanishing point is death. What we call old age is only the time at which this failure becomes manifest by reason of its having reached the active functions of the body. If we represent to ourselves the whole process of life as a sort of accumulation by compound interest of a fortune, the expenditure of which we call a work or action, it will not be wholly true to say that youth is a hoarding, manhood a spending, and old age a bankruptcy. We must add that the interest is encroached upon even at the very first, and that this encroachment, though small at the beginning, steadily increases day by day, and thus daily more and more is taken away, not from the actual profit of to-day as compared with that of yesterday, but from what would have been the profit of to-day, had to-day been allowed to gather interest from yesterday's income at the same rate that yesterday gathered from the day before. Somewhere about manhood, the point is reached at which the encroachment puts an end to all further accumulation, and thence onwards there is, instead of a radually diminishing gain, a gradually increasing loss.

We may also trace the early seeds of decay by studying the history of particular organs, especially of those engaged in building up bodily framework, in transforming meat and drink into flesh and blood. Of all these organs, perhaps the most active and the most important is the liver; it is, as it were, the centre for the work of nourishing the body. In fact, it would not be unfair to take the relative size of the liver as a rough indication of the actual vital power possessed by an animal at various epochs of its existence. If we do this we cannot fail to be struck by the fact, that while in a full-grown man the weight of the liver is one thirty-sixth of the total weight of body, in an infant it amounts to as much as one-eighteenth; and there is a

time at which it is actually one half. We have here another indication that even at the very beginning of life the tether is being drawn in, that the movements of the earliest days point to a coming old age.

The exact time, however, at which decay makes itself felt, the greater or less length of days, is determined by the circumstances amid which the animal is placed, by the wear and tear incident to the labours of daily life. In our own bodies we may easily trace out, even in the most superficial organs, the mortal effects of work and rough usage. We are supplied during our youth with a second set of, to the physiologist, mysterious organs called teeth, which, though enjoying a certain kind of life, and capable of undergoing some amount of vital wasting and repair, cannot be wholly made anew. When worn out they are not replaced. Every one, sooner or later, must loose his teeth, either by dint of merè hard work, or through decay brought on by ill-usage and want of care. But through the loss of the one member, the tooth, the whole body suffers; the food taken is insufficient for the wants of the system, or, lacking the preparation it was wont to receive in the mouth, is unfit for the processes of digestion and nutrition. The man who has become toothless must sooner or later die, must sooner or later be starved to death, however long he may defer the end by careful artificial means. Even if decay were to touch directly with its finger no other part of the body, the loss of teeth would alone be sufficient to entail old age. But what is true of the teeth is also true of all the other organs of the body; they also enjoy and suffer partial but not complete renewal; they also, when worn out, are not replaced. Membranes, glands, muscles, nerve, and bones, all get damaged in the strife of life, are either "worn" down by the silent steady rub of every day life, or are "torn” by the sudden sharp pull of passing accident and disease. By wear or by tear all of them grow palsied as the years go on, and to few only of them can we give artificial aid. The sum of their feebleness is what we call old age.

It is the custom to speak of a fat old age and of a lean old age. There are folk whose bulk seems to keep pace with their years, who get more and more corpulent the older they grow. But it may be doubted whether persons of this build ever reach a very advanced old age. It is much more common to meet them on this rather than on the other side of threescore years and ten. Although their obesity is in some measure a shield against many adverse influences, and, moreover, lessens' wear' in as much as it shuts them off from exertion, they are proverbially feeble against the attacks of accident and disease. Extreme fatness may, indeed, be regarded as of itself a disease, brought about by excep

tional though prevalent causes rather than as a natural failure and decay. At all periods of life there may be witnessed in various organs an unhealthy tendency to form fat instead of flesh, and the same result may be induced at will through improper diet or the slow action of various poisons. Life is then rather choked up with things strange and foreign to its wants than blighted through lack of stuff and power.

The true old age is the shrivelled old age, the 'lean and slippered pantaloon,' whose 'shrunk shank' and 'childish treble' tell of the material changes wrought in the whole body through the failing strength of all the members. These material changes may all be gathered under two or three heads. The scantiness of fat, which may be first noticed, is of the least importance, and hardly needs remark; the withered grandsire may share that feature in common with his lean and wiry but, active grandson. Of far more, or rather of utterly different moment, is the lack of, what for want of a better word may be called, pure flesh. In all living parts, not in muscle only but in skin and gland, in nerve and brain, there is to be found a substance (or group of substances) which holds in its hand, as it were, the reins of the life of the part in which it is situate. Out of this substance, this pure flesh, this scattered and omnipresent yolk or through it, everything in the body is made, and to it everything that we take as food runs. This it is which carries on and governs all vital processes, and which gives the body, not only its active powers of all kinds but also its suppleness, its spring, and in a wide sense its elasticity. It is the lack of this which, other causes contributing to the effect, makes the old man withered, rigid, inelastic, which makes his skin wrinkled, his bones brittle, his limbs stiff, his all and every part lean and shrivelled, at the same time taking away all his power. Another class of changes may be spoken of as the storing up in the senile body of the waste products of vital action, particularly of earthy matters. In every work of the body, some amount of living tissue is used up, some living stuff gives up its life and becomes dead and useless matter. In the heyday of life we get rid of this waste material as soon as it is formed, but in old age it lingers in and clings to the body, because the organs set apart for getting rid of it share in the general feebleness. Not only so, but the organs which put away seem to decay even earlier than those which take in, so that the system, in spite of decreasing flesh and decreasing work, gets charged with worn-out useless matters, stored away in chinks and crannies, or swimming in various fluids. The wheels of life in old age get clogged as well as worn. Lastly, notwithstanding this accumulation of waste products, notwithstanding the lean and withered aspect, the shrunk limbs and dry harsh skin, we

find, when we come to use the balance, that the flesh of old age is really more watery than that of manhood, so great has been the loss of all the true active living stuffs.

It is interesting to observe how old age does not invade the whole of the body at once, but seems to march victorious from one system of organs to another. It was a fancy of a brilliant physiologist that, as in the growth of a man there came first eating and drinking, then muscular, and lastly mental life, each arriving at its fulness in turn, so in the downward path, did no accident or disease intervene, the brain would fail first, next the muscles, and last of all the instruments of nourishment. But the fancy is not borne out by facts. We learn from the experiments on starvation that the last part to suffer from lack of food is the orain (and nervous system); the other members seem to deny themselves in order to nourish it. And in the long-delayed starvation of old age the same holds true; life seems to retreat from the ignoble to the more noble parts. The skin and glandular organs give the first token of decline, the muscles take up the tale, and the brain is the last to own it. Have we not often seen judgment and knowledge and wisdom borne on tottering limbs? The lean and slippered pantaloon lags behind far more in body than in mind; and when he comes to touch on mere oblivion, he is, indeed, near that "sans everything"death. M. F.

PENCILLED PAGES.

"We have strayed

Wild as the mountain bee, and culled a sweet
From every flower that beautified our way."

IN the following extract from a sermon by Theodore Parker, on "Conscious Religion a Source of Joy," there may be a phrase or two not in harmony with our own most cherished belief and reverence. But making allowance for this, there will, perhaps, be felt to be a something in his happy out-look at creation, from which Christians of more orthodox creeds might possibly do well to learn. It may be entitled

SPRING JOYS IN THE LOWER CREATION.

"Look over the bountiful distribution of joy in the world. It abounds in the lower walks of creation. The young fish you