OLD AGE AND DEATH 377 



animals, however, and especially in man, the matter is 

 much more complicated. The signals for stoking or resting 

 are plainly given, but some higher nerve-centre counter- 

 mands them. We disregard the moral of the worker- 

 bee's life, (c) The artificiality and injuriousness of many 

 human activities and environments must necessarily affect 

 the character of the physiological bad debts which lead on to 

 natural death. The death is inevitable ; but just as there is 

 more than one kind of bankruptcy, so there are different 

 forms of old age. Everything depends upon the nature of 

 the bad debts. We may have an old age such as Cicero 

 praised, or one whose days are labour and sorrow. As there 

 is no power of regeneration in the nervous system for, 

 except in very rare cases of injury, we never get any new 

 nerve-cells after we are born and as it is especially the 

 wearing out of the nervous system which makes the down- 

 grade of life often ugly, and as it is pre-eminently by rest 

 and change and a quiet mind that the nervous system is 

 kept young, we come again to the old commonplace, " Let 

 us be aisy ; and if we can't be aisy, let us be as aisy as we 

 can." (d) In contrasting man and the animals, we have 

 also, of course, to remember that in many cases there has 

 come about in human societies a system of protective 

 agencies which allow the old to survive through a period of 

 prolonged senility. We cannot do otherwise in regard to 

 those we love ; but it is plain that our better ambition would 

 be to raise the standard of our vitality so that, if we have an 

 old age, it may not be more than senescent. 



After writing these hard sayings, we were relieved to 

 read what Dr. Humphrey said in 1885 : " Through the 

 growth of this germ (of sympathy) it was given to man to 

 introduce a new factor into the economy of Nature, and by 

 forethought, by mutual co-operation, and by care for 

 others, which are the very essence, at any rate the very best 



