with fads and meticulous attention to details of personal health and to experiments in diet and patent medicines. Loss of control, due to failure of the higher centres, engenders restlessness, garrulity, emotional weakness, and peevishness. There may be considerable variation in the moods, so that the deep depression of one day may vanish the next, and irritability and apathy may alternate. Regression, which closely corresponds to the “devolution” of Hughlings Jackson, who argued that in disease the organism tends to retrace the steps of its development, accounts for the phenomena of “the second childhood.” Thus the old are prone to nervous apprehension, and liable to suggestion and to hysteria which Rivers[184] defined as a protective mechanism representing a recrudescence of the reaction to danger in an early stage of animal development. Will power, like their gait, becomes hesitant and uncertain. This devolutionary change progresses partially and not universally; memory for personal names, as mentioned above, is often the first to fail, because, like the mathematical faculty, it has from the attendant difficulty a high place in the order of mental processes; hence forgetfulness of personal names is a criterion of psychical fatigue and neurasthenia (Dupuis[185]). In old animals it is natural for the instinct of self-preservation to fade, as is exemplified in the day-flies which in their larval stage are well endowed with this property, and as their end draws near animals seem to acquire an instinct for death comparable to that for sleep. But in human beings, although they usually dislike old age, there is generally what Matthew Arnold[186] called “a passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty clinging to life.” Metchnikoff specially investigated this point and found hardly any instances in which death was anticipated with the same feelings of pleasure as is sleep by the weary. Considering the discomforts of many old people it is rather remarkable how very seldom they endorse the words of the burial service: “We give thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world.” Various explanations have been offered for this want of harmony between the mental and physical states of the old; it has been ascribed to the idea of eternal punishment, and to the presence of pathological conditions which bring on senility and death prematurely and thus alter what should be the normal mental attitude of healthy old age. In speaking of the usual fear of death in old people it should be mentioned that shortly before death this commonly disappears and, as G. E. Day,[187] R. W. Mackenna,[188] and Thompson and Todd point out, the aged when seriously ill commonly regard death as a welcome release; the famous William Hunter’s last words in his sixty-fifth year expressed his sense of resignation: “If I had strength enough to hold a pen, I would write how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die.”