Let us glance briefly at the public and private provisions in different lands for the care of the aged, another large topic with a literature of its own. Here, too, we find great diversity of method and theory which it would be premature to attempt to harmonize. Indeed, so limited is our present knowledge of old age that the available data here also open rather than close most of the great questions about it, although we do seem to be at the beginning of a new era regarding this stage of life. If on the one hand, the length of life is increasing, as we have seen, on the other the intensity of modern life and industry is steadily reducing the age of maximal efficiency so that we feel the handicap of years earlier in life than formerly. The pressure of the advancing upon the retiring generation is ever-growing and if the manual laborer lives longer, he feels the impairment of age sooner. In fact, society is coming to a clearer realization, on the one hand, that youth must be served and conserved and, on the other, is just beginning to see that the same is true of old age. Not only is the average length of human life increasing as civilization advances but so is the relative and absolute number of old people. Although under the harder conditions that once prevailed those who reached advanced years did so by inherent energy of constitution as the choicest products of natural selection (even though relatively fewer in numbers), it is fortunate that those who now attain 60, 70, 80, etc., are on the average far more comfortable, as well as more numerous than ever before. Not only is eyesight conserved, loss of teeth made good, and many of the ailments of the aged mitigated by modern medicine and hygiene, but by homes, pensions, etc., their lot is made far easier. Youth tends to live in and for the present and middle life is too absorbing; while the decrepitude of old age seems so remote and its attainment so uncertain that the masses of mankind are still far too improvident of the future. It is somewhat as if our race had developed in tropical abundance where there was little need of providing food, clothing, and shelter, and had not adjusted even to a more northern climate, still less to the complexities of modern civilization and least of all to the increased chance of attaining old age with its infirmities. Still, great progress has been made in foresight and futures play an ever greater rôle in human calculations. The impulse to accumulate possessions itself always has a protensive factor and we cannot amass property without thinking of its safety and its use, and so we lay by, insure and bequeath.