Just now we are told that the whole domain of consciousness since civilization began has had little influence upon the deeper and older unconscious elements of human nature but no one among these psychoanalysts has for a moment insisted that it had none. The moral in both cases is simply that we must now make far larger drafts upon the inexhaustible bank of Time and realize that in the one case, body, and in the other, mind, is immeasurably older than we had deemed them to be, that is, that both germ plasm and the unconscious have been very long in the making and come to us charged with potencies innate in the individual but very slowly acquired--in the one case by the ascending orders of animal life from the first and, in the other, by man and his ancestors. We certainly have not yet heard the last word from zoölogy which, while stressing the hereditary factors, for example, and individual longevity, must admit that old age in general is a more or less acquired character. Before we do so, an important correlation, to which I shall advert later, between these investigations and those in the new field of the endocrine glands and the hormones that have such new and marvelous power of speedy and profound influences upon so many parts of and processes that go on in the body, must be made.[168] One of the chief traits of old age is the loss of germ plasm with its power of perennially regenerating life and this loss leaves the soma to slow degeneration. As germ substance decreases individuality generally increases, sometimes in the form of gross selfishness. As the body becomes cadaverous or corpse-like and the springs of love begin to dry up at their source, secondary sex qualities fade and the sexes again become more alike, as in childhood, and the extremely senile are but the husk or shadow of their former selves. Tenaciously as life is clung to, it is at the same time felt to be less worth saving either here or hereafter, for whoever heard of senile decrepitude wanting to be continued beyond the grave. All ideals of a future life assume a restoration of maturity if not of youth. Doddering, desiccating senility has always been abhorrent to gods and men and I know of no either imaginative or scientific writer who has even attempted to describe the senium as it would be if prolonged to its extremest conceivable term, when each organ and function slowly ceased “altogether and nothing first”--ever shorter in stature, more shriveled and emaciated in form, hairless, the voice shrunk to a whisper, tottering, tremors, and then inability to work, move, or even eat; abatement of all natural functions, the senses slowly becoming extinct, teeth and the power of mastication gone, everything in a stage of progressive involution, increasing paralysis of all receptive or effector processes, offensive perhaps to the very senses of those about, seemingly forgotten for the time by death itself, which the