Nearly every civilized country to-day makes some provision for the aged poor. While they are often cared for along with the infirm and sick in hospitals, or with paupers in poor- and workhouses, or allowed to beg on the street, etc., there are now many charitable funds and pensions, public and private, provided especially for the aged. Most funds for all the dependent classes can also be used for their benefit at home or in institutions; and social and philanthropic work, where it exists, is always ready to consider helpless age, which has its own appeal to sympathy and benevolence. The number of such cases is almost everywhere increasing and so are the provisions for them. As charity has always been praised as a virtue, it is now becoming also a science, and the peculiar nature and needs of old age are being better understood, although there is yet very much to be done in studying this stage of life which has in the past been so neglected and misunderstood. We are now far more ignorant of senescence than of adolescence, childhood, or middle age, but it is quite as unique, on the whole, and more apart than any of these other periods. There is a sense, too, in which those in each stage of life know least of it. The child knows little of childhood, which had to be discovered in this “century of the child.” The second childhood of old age often knows itself only little better. The child cannot, the old will not, realize their age for what it is and what it means. Our conspectus is as follows: The first German Old Age and Invalidity Insurance Law dates from 1889 and has been modified since by various supplementary acts so that it is now very comprehensive. These acts were due to the social democratic agitation that prompted Bismarck to set a backfire and thus allay the discontent of the working classes. Old-age insurance has been obligatory since 1889 upon practically all laborers and officials paid under $500 a year and the right to insure voluntarily is extended to others. The employer is held responsible for the insurance of everyone and deducts the workman’s share of the premium from his wages. In 1910 some 14,000,000 out of a population of 60,000,000 were thus insured. The obligation to insure begins with the 17th year and a percentage of the wages must be paid for 1200 weeks. The Empire and the employer also contribute--the former a fixed annual sum of $11.90. There are five wage classes and a special postal service with insurance stamps. It is, however, impossible to obtain from German reports much data for old age alone, which is almost always classed with invalidity and often with accident, sickness, etc. As in every country, there was at first much discussion whether such social insurance should be compulsory or voluntary, contributory or non-contributory, universal or partial, etc., and different countries and agencies have decided these questions differently.