The activity of the glands remaining in exercise, appears to be owing to two causes. 1st. The decomposition being very great at this age, many substances are presented to the glands to be thrown out. An old person decreases by a phenomenon opposite to the rapid growth of the fœtus, in which the glandular system throws out scarcely any thing from the economy. 2d. The skin having the horny hardness and being contracted, ceasing in part to be an emunctory of the products of decomposition, the glands supply the place of these functions. The cutaneous and glandular systems are then in the same relation as in winter and in cold countries, in which, we have seen, that the second constantly supplies the place of the first. In general, the glandular system is one of those in which life is the most slowly extinguished. In the dead bodies of old people we find the bile still filling the gall-bladder, the bladder full of urine, &c. All the glands when compressed, the prostate itself, permit a large quantity of fluid to escape from their excretories. I have even observed that in this compression, we uniformly press out more fluid in an old subject than in a young one. The older the animals are, the more their kidneys, as we know, preserve the urinous smell. The lungs, which abound so much in mucous surfaces and consequently in mucous glands, are not withered and have not the horny hardening in old age; they perform their functions as regularly as in youth. In general it is a very remarkable phenomenon that all the principal internal organs, the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, the heart, the lungs, &c. still preserve a very considerable vital force, whilst the sensitive and locomotive organs already almost exhausted, have broken in part the communications which connect the individual with the objects which surround him. DERMOID SYSTEM. All animals are covered with a more or less compact membrane, of a thickness in general proportioned to the size of their body, destined to defend the subjacent parts, to carry out a considerable portion of the residue of nutrition and digestion, and to place it in relation with external bodies. It is in man a sensitive boundary, placed at the extremity of the domain of his mind, where these bodies continually touch, for the purpose of establishing the relations of his animal life, and of thus connecting his existence with that of every thing which surrounds him. This covering is the _dermis_ or skin. We shall call the whole of it the Dermoid System. ARTICLE FIRST. FORMS OF THE DERMOID SYSTEM. The covering which forms this system, being proportioned to the parts that it covers, is applied to these parts, adapted to their great inequalities, and allows the largest external prominences to be visible, but conceals a great number on account of their small size; thus the appearance of the body stripped of skin differs very much from that with the skin on.