TEE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. 413 



of the third year he rode all about the country where the roads 

 were good and for hours at a time. The loss in weight scarcely showed 

 in the first two years, but after that it was sufficiently great to be satis- 

 factory. At the age of seventy-six he feels himself to be all of twenty 

 years younger than when he began. 



The Menopause. 

 There is a time about the middle of the life of women which is 

 called the critical period and is supposed to be fraught with many 

 dangers and grave disturbances. This period of the climacteric has 

 been grossly exaggerated, and it is by no means necessary to look for- 

 ward with dread to the time when menstruation ceases. Man 

 reaches the period of highest development at forty-one years, and 

 woman at thirty-nine. The following seven to ten years may 

 be called the age or epoch of invigoration in both the sexes. The 

 tissues have then become most stable and the nutrition of the body 

 is at its best. It is one of the epochs of development and naturally 

 is accompanied by certain characteristic features. In man these epochs 

 are marked as follows : Dentition, pubescence and the climacteric of 

 age. These are all practically developmental phases, although the last 

 is usually accompanied by degenerative changes in one or another vital 

 organ by which resistance in the tissues is lessened, allowing relatively 

 slight influences finally to cause death. In woman there is generally 

 recognized another, styled the change of life, or menopause. Modern 

 investigations seem to demonstrate beyond a doubt that this change of 

 life is merely a conservative process of nature to provide for a higher 

 and more stable phase of existence, an economic lopping off of a function 

 no longer needed, preparing the individual for different forms of 

 activity, but is in no sense pathologic. It is not sexual or physical 

 decrepitude, but belongs to the age of invigoration, marking the 

 fullness of the bodily and mental powers. There are rather more 

 decided changes in the blood-making and blood-elaborating organs in 

 women, toward the end of life, than in men. Man's greater activity 

 enables him to escape this contrast, because as a rule he has called more 

 upon his motor machinery in using up injested and assimilated 

 material. The life of woman leads her to become more impressionable 

 and to watch over her menstrual days, think of them, make allowances 

 for the exigencies which may arise at such times, and to expect various 

 disturbances and discomforts. If her mind becomes fixed upon some 

 one small ailment or other, especially connected with this function, 

 there is almost an inevitable hyperconsciousness and a continuance or 

 an exaggerated degree of attention which is practically hysterical even 

 in the best of women. Such disturbances as do arise about the time of 

 the menopause are largely due to a normal failure of the organism to 



