There are two views of age. One is Hogarth’s picture--a shattered bottle, cracked bell, unstrung bow, signpost of a tavern called the “World’s End,” shipwreck, Phoebus’s horses dead in the clouds, the moon in her last quarter, the world on fire. It only remained to add to this the picture of a painter’s palette broken. This was his last work and he died at 67. Over against this we might place E. E. Hale, who late in life said his prospects cast no shadow and became very anxious to see the curtain rise. When he was 80 he published his _Memoirs of a Hundred Years_ and at 82 was chaplain of the United States Senate. Gladstone locked every affair of state out of his bedroom and said that when we sleep we must pay attention to it, for a workless is a worthless life. This author agrees with J. H. Canfield, who protested that the old should stay in the harness and not step out to give the young men a chance, for they never had a better chance than to work with their elders, as colts are best broken in with old horses. As we grow old we see that nothing, after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith finds comfort in the fact that, according to the census of 1900, one in every two hundred becomes an octogenarian and that out of a population of 36,800,000 there were 176,571 reputed to be 80 years of age or over. He finally gives us his own empirical observations about foods and concludes that three-fourths of all the poor health in the country is due to dietary errors or to “carrion and cathartics.” The old should eat no meat, take no drink with meals, avoid starch, recognize the error in the belief that they need stimulants, and should not try to be fat but realize that progressive emaciation is normal. Appetite should be our guide although we should eat only about half what we want. He, too, praises laziness as a concomitant of longevity and recognizes a vast difference in dietary needs. He would never use laxatives but depends upon two glasses of water half an hour before breakfast and two in the afternoon, and would never mix cooked vegetables nor fruit. The popularity and wide sale of this book must have been extremely gratifying to the author as not only showing wide and deep interest in the subject but as also supplying, by copious data and illustrations, the kind of encouragement the old often sorely need. The author makes no pretenses of being scientific and accepts cases of reputed great age with no critical scruples.