WHY GROW OLD? 237 



gether the several parts of the machine takes her own work to 

 pieces. As the person who has built a ship or a house likewise 

 takes it down with the greatest ease, so the same Nature which 

 glued together the human machine takes it asunder most skill- 

 fully." 



Death by extreme old age may be considered the desirable end 

 of a long-continued and at times weary journey. The pilgrim be- 

 gins it in infancy, full of hope and lifej continues it through 

 adolescence in its roseate hue ; and onward until middle age, with 

 its cares and anxieties, begins to dispel the illusion. Then comes 

 the time of life when vitality begins to decline, and the body to 

 lose its capacity for enjoyment ; then comes the desire for rest, 

 the feeling that foreshadows the great change ; and if this occurs 

 in extreme age, the sufferer seems to fall asleep, as he might do 

 after severe fatigue. 



So the long and, in many cases, the weary pilgrimage of life is 

 brought to a close with little apparent derangement of mental 

 powers ; the final scene may be short and painless, and the phe- 

 nomena of dying almost imperceptible. The senses fail as if sleep 

 were about to intervene, the perception becomes gradually more 

 and more obtuse, and by degrees the aged man seems to pass into 

 his final slumber. 



In such an end the stock of nerve-power is exhausted the 

 marvelous and unseen essence, that hidden mystery, that man 

 with all his powers of reasoning, that physiology with all the aid 

 that science has lent it, and the genius of six thousand years, has 

 failed to fathom. In that hour is solved that secret, the mystery 

 of which is only revealed when the Book of Life is closed forever. 

 Then, we may hope, when Nature draws the veil over the eye that 

 is glazing on this world, at that same moment she is opening to 

 some unseen but spiritual eye a vista, the confines of which are 

 only wrapped by the everlasting and immeasurable bounds of 

 eternity. The Gentleman's Magazine. 



G. A. LEBORET, writing of the late disaster at St. Gervais, Switzerland, from 

 the breaking of a glacial dam, and recalling other stupendous calamities of like 

 character, charges British geologists, living in a country where Nature's moods 

 are mild, with being too averse to admitting cataclysmal phenomena and of being 

 disposed unconsciously to belittle and almost ignore the occasional violent action 

 of the various rock-destroyers. With such catastrophes in mind as have occurred 

 several times in the Alps, of which that of St. Gervais is only one specimen ; 

 with the flood in the Indus in 1835, beside which these sink into insignificance 

 and not forgetting our Johnstown flood one must hesitate before assigning too 

 uniform a degree of intensity to the various agents of denudation; nor can one 

 easily avoid the conclusion that, as regards some of them, their rate of work was 

 occasionally far greater in past than in present times. 



