Metchnikoff in his essay on Old Age tells us that at Vate the “old men have at least this consolation--that during the funeral ceremonies it is customary to attach to their arms a pig which may be eaten during the feast given in honor of the departure of the soul for the other world.” After citing other similar cases, he tells us that civilized people are not unlike savages for although they do not kill superannuated members of the community they often make their lives very unhappy, the old often being considered as a heavy charge, which causes great impatience at the delay of death. This is expressed in the Italian proverb that old women have seven lives and the Burgomasks think that old women have seven souls, besides an eighth soul, quite small, and half a soul besides; while the Lithuanians complain that an old woman is so tenacious of life that she can not be even ground in a mill. He cites the protest of Paris medical students against the decision of the state superseding the law prescribing a limit of age for the professors, saying, “We do not want dotards.” A convict in the Saghalien Islands condemned for the assassination of several old men said, “What is the use of making such a fuss about them? They are already old and would die anyway in a few years.” In Dostoievsky’s _Crime and Punishment_ one student declared in a group of his mates that he would kill and rob the cursed old woman without the slightest remorse, and continues, “On the one side we have a stupid, unfeeling old woman, of no account, wicked and sick, whom no one would miss--on the contrary, who is an injury to everyone and does not herself know why she keeps on living and who perhaps will be good and dead to-morrow; while, on the other hand, there are fresh young lives wasting for nothing at all, without being helped by anyone, that can be numbered by thousands.” Old men, too, often commit suicide. Prussian statistics show that people between 50 and 80 commit suicide about twice as often as those between 20 and 50, and the same is true of Denmark. “The young and strong adults furnished, therefore, 36½ per cent of the suicides, while the number furnished by the aged amounted to 63½ per cent.” Metchnikoff finds that “the desire to live, instead of diminishing tends, on the contrary, to increase with age.” “The old Fuegian women, aware that they are destined to be eaten, flee into the mountains, whither they are pursued by the men and carried back home where they must submit to death.” “The philosopher in me does not believe in death; it is the old man who has not the courage to face the inevitable.” And so it is that old professors rarely wish to abandon their chairs. Nor do they even always renounce the tender passion, a fact illustrated by Goethe, who at the age of 74 fell in love with a girl of 17, proposed marriage to her, and failing in the project wrote his pathetic _Elegy of Marienbad_, in which he said “For me the universe is lost; I am lost to myself.