As preliminary to even this, it slowly came to me that I must, first of all, take careful stock of myself and now seek to attain more of the self-knowledge that Socrates taught the world was the highest, hardest, and last of all forms of knowledge. I must know, too, just how I stand in with my present stage of life. Hence I began with a physical inventory and visited doctors. The oculist found a slight but unsuspected defect in one eye and improved my sight, which was fairly good before, by better glasses. The aurist found even the less sensitive ear fairly good. Digestion was found to be above the average. I had for years been losing two or three pounds a year, but this rather than the opposite tendency to corpulence was pronounced good (_Corpora sicca durant_), and I was told that I might go on unloading myself of superfluous tissue for fifteen or twenty years before I became too emaciated to live, which humans, like starving animals, usually do on losing about one-third of their weight. My heart would probably last about the same length of time if I did not abuse it, and smoking in moderation, a great solace, was not forbidden. A little wine, “the milk of old age,” was not taboo and I was given a prescription to enable me to get it if I desired, even in these prohibition days. One suggested that I insure my life heavily and another advised an annuity; but I thought neither of these quite fair in view of the above findings, for I did not wish to profiteer on my prospects of life. This hygienic survey reinforced what I had realized before, namely, that physicians know very little of old age. Few have specialized in its distinctive needs, as they have in the diseases of women and children and the rest. Thus the older a man is, the more he must depend upon his own hygienic sagacity for health and long life. The lives of nearly all the centenarians I have been able to find show that they owe their longevity far more to their own insight than to medical care, and there seems to be a far greater individual difference of needs than medicine yet recognizes. Of the philosopher, Kant, it was said that he spent more mentality in keeping his congenitally feeble body alive and in good trim to the age of eighty than he expended in all the fourteen closely printed volumes of his epoch-making _Works_.