At 64 he felt that he had written himself out but soon struck other veins, so that his later books cannot be called inferior to his earlier ones. In editing poems of Nature at this time he found so many aspects of it that poets had overlooked that he undertook to supply the gap and had a period of rhyming that lasted about a year. This suggests another octogenarian I knew, a great leader in mathematics and a man of international fame, who in his latest years believed that he had poetic gifts and wooed the muses, even the goddess of love, with canticles that amazed his friends, who wondered whether he was just making his acquaintance with poetry for the first time or had known it more discriminatingly earlier in life and lost his standards. Another eminent man I knew whose name is known throughout the literary world, and who was also a physician, believed in and practiced frequent naps, in which I have seen him indulge between the courses of a long public dinner, in the intervals of which he would converse with all his old sprightliness and vigor and at the close make the best speech of the occasion. There was no record of even midday sleeps with the naturalist above described. He usually did his best work in the forenoon but occasionally, even in the last years of his life, worked till late at night and resumed early in the morning, doing this for some days as with a kind of afflatus. He also kept up an active interest in public affairs until his increasing illness compelled him to narrow down his interests more and more, so that toward the end they seemed to center entirely in himself. A man of eighty ceased manual work at fifty and had a marked intellectual renaissance and became an author. He has come to realize the limitations of doctors and, although he employs them, is his own ultimate judge in all matters pertaining to his health. He has withdrawn from the influence of the clergy. “My science and reason say that there is no hereafter while my faith says that there is but I do not give myself any trouble about their quarrel for it will all be decided soon enough.” “I am more disposed to take the far view of things and try to estimate wider relations than formerly.” “I feel that my duty is to the race and to humanity rather than to any section of it.” He reads science and occasionally a good story, although the latter “must have some interest besides that of love.” “I formerly was fond of hunting and fishing but the killing instinct has faded with age, as it does with most people; but the forest and field, the sea and land, are beautiful beyond compare and their infinitely varied forms are more bewitching than ever.” Everyone, he thinks, should have some Bohemia into which he should retreat when overtaken by age and has leisure, and his has been genealogy, mainly getting acquainted with his own ancestors and trying to visualize them as men and women, feeling that he owes to them all his qualities, mental, moral, and physical.