More serious is the objection that, according to his criterion and curves of declining growth rate, we are really old when we stop growing, for the mature young man and the very old one both are living but a very little above the deadline. On this view, the extinct saurians that grew all their lives were far more vital than creatures that attain a relatively fixed and constant size early and then stop growing. Growth is one measure of vitality, but surely function is another. The dynamic curve of energy and the power of work rises rapidly as that of growth declines and the curve of brain work reaches its apex somewhat later. Determining the increment of pounds or even of foot pounds of energy is not the sole measure of vitality. Again, if all differentiation is progress toward death, evolution itself, instead of being progressive, is really retrogressive and the ascending orders of life are only a funeral march to the grave. Minot admits this in principle but says that although the advance it brings is bought at the price of death, it is worth all it costs. So it is, but it will not be if the organization and its increase in heterogeneity of structure are only morphological. It pays because of the quest for the good, the beautiful, and the true; because of science, law, love, the control of nature, the organization of society; because of the supreme joy of just being alive and the exhilarating sense of progress. The more evolved all creatures are, including man, the more the pleasure field overlaps the field of pain. As the hypercivilized mind often longs back, like Rousseau, to an idyllic state of nature; or the world-weary pietist longs back to God; and, we may now add, as the psychoanalyst finds what he deems a psychodynamic equivalent for this trend, in a perhaps yet more exaggerated form, in the flight from reality, seen in dementia præcox and in longing for the mother’s lap and, as Ferenczi says, even for her womb; so Minot’s view of life might almost justify a kind of homesickness for the state of the ovum or the immortal germ plasm, for in this state of incipiency a single-celled organism performs all the functions of life, not only nutritive and reproductive but sensient and motor. It is at this stage, when all cells do all things, that the spirit of life celebrates its highest triumph. The sigh for lost youth is here deepest. Life itself as we know it from this viewpoint seems a little falsetto and pathetic, for it is throughout, in a sense, a fall.