I have personally interviewed a patriarch, who, at sixty-five, was awaiting death with constant expectancy, and was helping to attain it by every sort of favourable suggestion. It happened that he had his portrait taken in a photograph gallery on his sixty-fifth birthday as a last souvenir to be distributed among his friends. Shortly after that, in the fruity and salubrious foothills of the Pacific Coast of California, he met with accidental suggestion which changed his habits of living, and, very soon, his attitude toward life and death. I sat with the patriarch on his one hundredth birthday in the same photograph gallery, examined the portraits of sixty-five and one hundred years, conversed with the subject in a low tone of voice, looked upon a man who felt that he was yet in middle life, and in possession of an enjoyment of life that he said had never been equalled in the early years of his bondage to the ignorance and impatience of youth.[13] [Footnote 13: The rejuvenated patriarch is still alive in 1903.] * * * * * STUDY NATURE Watch good Nature, observe her methods, try to imitate them by way of experiment, and you will find that, as heretofore stated, there is a _perfect way_ enfolded in all of Nature's problems and that man has only to discover the way to have it freely accessible to him. Watch a child take its nourishment in natural manner. The sucking action is like the act of mastication in that it excites the glands which supply fluids to the mouth. Whatever number of these fluids there may be, I will class them all as saliva. Certainly in the case of milk being taken into the stomach, saliva is not needed to lubricate it. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that saliva is intended as a part of the mixture necessary to digestion; that is, to the conversion of the food into nutriment. In the case of children nourished at the breast of the mother--the only natural way--the food is already alkaline and ready for digestion in the stomach and intestines as related previously. Remember also that, in the case of invalids with very weak stomachs, physicians recommend taking milk and broth through a straw or through a glass tube. Taking fluid this way requires a sucking action of the mouth and thereby induces a flow of saliva. _Of course_, the fluid is better digested than when drunk because Nature's way has been followed, and it is no wonder that milk and often soups of different kinds are indigestible, if taken contrary to the natural way, except in digestive systems which have not yet exhausted their ten-horse-power resistance capacity.