Some place first the duty of providing wisely and well for their families and friends after their death. A few are oppressed by the thought that they still owe the world far more than they can pay, although one who has lived a life of very large usefulness thinks the world owes him now far more than he owes it. Some have a dread amounting almost to horror of being useless and wish, above all things, to be not a burden but serviceable. A few feel the same old duties, with no change. Others feel called to give to the world, or at least to those about them, advice and admonition based upon the rich lessons of experience. Some who have been lifelong slaves to duty resolve that they will now emancipate themselves and live henceforth according to their own pleasure. Some feel that their time and strength for doing good have so abated that it is vain to try to accomplish anything more and that they must devote themselves to being, instead of doing, good, and would thus cultivate every grace of character and let their light so shine as to be examples to others, so that self-development must henceforth be their chief effort. In such answers as are before me two things stand out with special prominence. The first is that the men of science, who constitute about one-third of all, have unfinished studies, which they feel it is their supreme duty to complete before their powers abate. It is less often new themes to which they would consecrate their energies than old ones on which already very much work has been done and that they rightly feel no one else could properly finish and that would thus be lost to the world unless they themselves were able to complete it. These men are less intent upon public reforms or special civic duties than upon adding at least a tiny stone to the great temple of science, although only a few in their own specialty will ever appreciate or be benefited by their work. The world has certainly lost much, although probably less than those concerned think, by the death or the incapacitating senility of savants who left an unfinished window in their Aladdin tower. We all think of great novels, which the authors did not live to complete; of promising, intricate researches, which were perhaps bungled by the imperfect reports of the half-competent who undertook to present them to the world; of papers left by the old to be edited by their children or their advanced students, some of which had better have remained untouched; of belabored manuscripts, which survivors can make nothing of and which are perhaps piously preserved for years and eventually consigned to the flames. It is such fates for the children of their brain that some of our respondents seem to dread chiefly and it is this that prompts them to dreams, which are generally fatuous, of literary executors or post-mortem publications.