Omitting, for the time being, any discussion as to the precise accuracy of this statement, it is at any rate obvious that the life of an individual has its natural limit, at least among those animals and plants which are met with in every-day life. But it is equally obvious that the limits are very differently placed in the various species of animals and plants. These differences are so manifest that they have given rise to popular sayings. Thus Jacob Grimm mentions an old German saying, ‘A wren lives three years, a dog three times as long as a wren, a horse three times as long as a dog, and a man three times as long as a horse, that is eighty-one years. A donkey attains three times the age of a man, a wild goose three times that of a donkey, a crow three times that of a wild goose, a deer three times that of a crow, and an oak three times the age of a deer.’ If this be true a deer would live 6000 years, and an oak nearly 20,000 years. The saying is certainly not founded upon exact observation, but it becomes true if looked upon as a general statement that the duration of life is very different in different organisms. The question now arises as to the causes of these great differences. How is it that individuals are endowed with the power of living long in such very various degrees? One is at first tempted to seek the answer by an appeal to the differences in morphological and chemical structure which separate species from one another. In fact all attempts to throw light upon the subject which have been made up to the present time lie in this direction. All these explanations are nevertheless insufficient. In a certain sense it is true that the causes of the duration of life must be contained in the organism itself, and cannot be found in any of its external conditions or circumstances. But structure and chemical composition—in short the physiological constitution of the body in the ordinary sense of the words—are not the only factors which determine duration of life. This conclusion forces itself upon our attention as soon as the attempt is made to explain existing facts by these factors alone: there must be some other additional cause contained in the organism as an unknown and invisible part of its constitution, a cause which determines the duration of life. The size of the organism must in the first place be taken into consideration. Of all organisms in the world, large trees have the longest lives. The Adansonias of the Cape Verd Islands are said to live for 6000 years. The largest animals also attain the greatest age. Thus there is no doubt that whales live for some hundreds of years. Elephants live 200 years, and it would not be difficult to construct a descending series of animals in which the duration of life diminishes in almost exact proportion to the decrease in the size of the body. Thus a horse lives forty years, a blackbird eighteen, a mouse six, and many insects only a few days or weeks.