In old age this texture is condensed and contracted; it acquires consistence and hardness. The teeth tear it with difficulty in the boiled flesh of old animals; like it, it is tough and requires long boiling to soften it. Much less fluid is exhaled there, hence a sort of dryness and rigidity, that render the motions of old age difficult. A kind of withering, that it experiences, contributes essentially to the general diminution that the body then undergoes. It loses its vital forces; hence its laxity, that prevents it from supporting the skin as usual. This becomes every where loose, dependent even in some places, in which it forms folds. The scrotum has no longer the power of contracting that characterized it and which it derived from the forces of the cellular system. This general relaxation, this sort of flaccidity is the constant attendant of old age, in individuals even in whom excess of all kinds, or a primitive disposition, have rendered this age premature. I saw at the Medical Society a dwarf, sixteen years of age, hardly two feet high, who had already begun to grow old; his sub-cutaneous texture had that laxity, that does not belong to his age. The premature decrepitude of the dwarf of the king of Poland, exhibited the same phenomenon. Two persons who lived a long time with him informed me, that at his death, there was externally this relaxation and flaccidity of integuments, of which the subjacent cellular texture appears to be the seat. It is rare in old age to find osseous incrustations in the cellular texture. In the great number of old persons that I have had occasion to dissect, or to have dissected, I remember to have seen but one, and that occupied the posterior part of the mesentery. I have seen some others in adults, especially in women, in whom they are found frequently, in the cellular texture that separates the womb from the rectum; I have preserved several specimens of these. NERVOUS SYSTEM OF ANIMAL LIFE.