The Taoists represent their saints, in the shade of willows, seeking the elixir of life, and in Chinese Buddhist temples there are placed votive cakes shaped like the tortoise, a sacred animal and the symbol of long life. Worshippers let stones of divination fall on these cakes and so ascertained if their lives were to be prolonged, promising for each subsequent year as many cakes as the divinity might demand. The mysticism of the East reached Europe in the Middle Ages, and then, and even in modern times, drugs were used to prolong life. Cagliostro, the celebrated quack of the eighteenth century, boasted that he had discovered an elixir of life by the use of which he had survived for many thousand years. There still exists, in some modern pharmacopœias, an “elixir ad longam vitam” compounded of aloes and other purgatives. Analogous preparations are known, such as the “vital essence of Augsburg” which is a mixture of purgatives and resins. Serious physicians have rejected such preparations of the quacks. They have abandoned the search for a specific, and, in their efforts to prolong human life, have relied on common rules of hygiene, such as cleanliness, exercise, fresh air, and general sobriety. In our own days, Brown-Séquard is an isolated instance of a seeker for a specific against senescence. This distinguished physiologist, setting out from the view that the weakness of old men is due partly to diminution of the secretions of the testes, hoped to find a remedy in the employment of subcutaneous injections of emulsions of the testes of animals (dogs and guinea-pigs). Brown-Séquard,[110] then aged 72 years, gave himself several such injections, and declared that he found himself reinforced and rejuvenated. Since then, numbers of persons have undergone the treatment which for a time was in vogue. The observations of physicians, made on old men and sick persons, have not justified the hopes which were entertained of the mode of treatment. Fürbringer,[111] in particular, working in Germany, has discredited the injections of Brown-Séquard. However, instead of following exactly the original prescription, Fürbringer employed a testicular emulsion which had been previously raised to the boiling-point. Brown-Séquard’s method has not resisted scientific investigation, and although it is still occasionally employed in France, it has been given up in many countries. Brown-Séquard laid stress on the efficacy of emulsions of testis as opposed to chemical substances prepared from the gland. Other scientific men, on the other hand, have attached value to such substances and in particular to an organic alkali the salt of which is known as spermine. That salt, made by Poehl of St. Petersburg, has been largely used. Several observers declare that its employment, injected in solution or even absorbed directly as a powder, has been followed by a strengthening of bodily power enfeebled by age or labour.