_Insomnia in old age._--The highest physical perfection is reached before the fortieth year of life. Between this age and the forty-fifth year man’s vigor begins to decline. The power of accommodation diminishes, necessitating the use of spectacles; adipose tissues begin to load the body; the hair grows thin, and begins to bleach. The processes of nutrition and of disassimilation become more sluggish; the appetites and passions gradually subside. Sometimes the moderation of nervous excitability thus effected permits indulgences of the appetite for food that were impossible during earlier years--the nervous dyspeptic can tolerate dainties which would formerly have been unendurable. Less disturbed by the solicitations of sense, the powers of reasoning and of judgment enlarge their authority. Under favorable circumstances this period of life may continue for about twenty years, when old age develops. From the sixtieth to the eightieth year the progress of decline is rapidly accelerated, and life is normally terminated between the eightieth and eighty-fifth years of existence. The rare examples of greater longevity are too few in number to warrant the assumption that a century of years is the physiological complement of life. As old age advances, the time of sleep is slightly abridged. The moderated activity of the body requires only a diminished rate of repair to make good the waste of the tissues. Less sleep, therefore, is needed. But the liability of age to the incidence of arthritic diseases, rheumatism, and disorders of the heart, blood vessels, digestive apparatus, and urinary organs, renders the period of decline particularly subject to those varieties of sleeplessness which depend upon such derangements of health. The nutrition of the brain suffers under such circumstances, and the substance of the organ becomes morbidly irritable. Insomnia among the aged often owes its cause to these unwholesome conditions. The biography of the celebrated Carlyle affords numerous illustrations of this variety of wakefulness. Disease of the cerebral blood vessels sometimes originates a series of changes differing only in degree and intensity from the classical type of chronic periencephalitis. This is characterized by many of the minor phenomena of general paresis, only occasionally rising to the level of that disease. Wakefulness is one of the most troublesome symptoms of this disorder. Its management requires attention to all the details of excretion and nutrition. The diet must be carefully selected with reference to failure of the digestive function. Milk and water should be preferred for drink, and the great emunctory organs of the body must be carefully stimulated and sustained. A judicious choice of climate may accomplish much for the comfort of the patient. The mild, insular climate of Florida, or of New Providence, or of the Sandwich Islands, affords superior advantages for the relief of sleepless sufferers in the northern