This does not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of age. Few, if any, schemes of cooeperative housekeeping have as yet worked well for the combination of such groups. The aged, especially the aged widow or widower, are not in the direct family group. They belong to but they are not inside the inmost circle. If one alone is left the life of the personal home is broken for the elderly, however dear and kind the children may be. For such there surely needs something easier than the attempt to maintain a separate home with half its life gone. And also something more independent and more secure than either enforced residence with children or compulsory use of the ordinary commercialized boarding house. =To Prevent Premature Old Age.=--The second social demand, that premature old age shall be more effectively prevented, is one that is pressed upon this generation with new and imperative considerations. A knowledge of health conditions shows that although infant mortality is greatly lessened and infectious and epidemic diseases greatly brought under control, the diseases of middle age, such as hardening of arteries and kidney and digestive disorders, have increased relatively, while insanity is much more frequent than of old. These facts give us all deep concern. From the failure of health in middle life comes the premature senility and the invalid weakness of old age. The cause of the increase of middle-life diseases, relatively to those of other periods of life, seems to be principally the pressure of business and industrial life upon the worker. The high speed of machinery, the extreme competition in business, the monotony of the specialized manufacturing groups, the weight of great financial enterprises and the struggle to make the family setting equal to the family desires or even the family needs, all tend to make men in middle life fail so often in health and so often leave behind their better sheltered and more tenderly cared-for wives. There is a new movement of great social importance, and one tending directly toward the saving of one-half of the family circle, which is now taking a front place in social interest; namely, the movement for annual medical examinations. The work of the Life Extension Institute leads toward this end and seeks the better adjustment of life and work in the interest of simplicity and mutual service in the family and the better health of all its members.