but it is probably far more common than what is usually called senile dementia, of which it is almost the diametrical opposite, although because of its prevalence it has a better claim to this designation. Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter, often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate. Years ago I had visited homes for the aged, held converse with many inmates and officials, had given each inmate a tiny blue book and asked them to answer a few questions and add anything that occurred to them that they thought characteristic of their stage of life. The records thus secured, although voluminous enough, had very little value. Most who answered were uneducated and the data they supplied were usually trivial, tediously and irrelevantly reminiscent, or else descriptive of surroundings in earlier life, complaints, wishes, fears, etc., so that I realized that true old age as I had conceived it was not to be sought in such institutions. There was pathos and pessimism galore, while disciplined tranquillity and serenity were very rare. There is doubtless material enough in even the most inarticulate and insignificant life to repay the longest and most painstaking study. Perhaps, too, a psychotherapy may sometime be evolved that will launch such stranded and arrested lives out again into the current and give them full fruition of all the fruitage of life. But the world is as yet far from any such beneficent ministry.