CHAPTER II. The History of Old Age

THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE

The age of plants and animals--The Old Stone Age--Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes--The views of Frazer--The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament--The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)--The Romans--The Middle Ages--Witchcraft and old women--Attitude of children toward the old--Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age--The division of life into stages--The relation of age groups to social strata--The religion of different ages of life--The Vedanta--The Freudian war between the old and the young--History of views from Cornaro to our own time--Bacon--Addison--Burton--Swift.

Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live. In the Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in circumference, which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to continue living fifty years after a third of it was destroyed. It must have been several thousand years old, but as its trunk was hollowed there was no way of ascertaining its age. In the Cape Verde Islands stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which Adanson estimated to be 5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in Mexico are thought to be quite as old. The big trees of California are several thousand years old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have lived 5,000 years. We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these monsters of the vegetable world with their concentric rings marked--“this growth was made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this when Christ was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning, tempests, etc.

As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life can also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is that many species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the lower forms of life the larval is far longer than the adult stage. The seventeen-year locust, for example, lives out most of its time underground, the imago form continuing but little more than a month. Most butterflies are annual, although those that fail to copulate may hibernate and live through another season, while some are known to have lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the season but queens live from two to five years. J. H. Gurney thinks the passerines are the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years, that the lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty, and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often assigned, one being said to have spoken a language that had become extinct. As to animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens their normal length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility. Beasts of prey breed slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit is short-lived. But for increased fecundity species subject to high risk would die out. While there is a certain correlation between size and age, since large animals require more time to grow, it is extremely limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals the period the new-born take to double in size is an index of the normal duration of life; but this, too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an essential factor and others think that length of life may be inversely as the reproductive tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our knowledge is still very limited.

When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter, dedicates this to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been found 160 years later. This is the earliest record I find of animal longevity. We have many tables since Flourens attempted, with great pains, to construct one, and from the latest of these at hand I select the following of those animals popularly supposed to be able to attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile, 100; crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100; raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E. Ray Lankester says, we know almost nothing definite of the length of life of larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we could find a criterion of the end of the growth period in the union of the epiphyses of the bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down the law that for both mammals and man longevity is, on the average, about five times that of this period of growth. We know far more as to the span of the shorter- than of the longer-lived members of the brute creation. We also know far more of domestic animals than of their wild congeners. The former doubtless have lived longer because better protected. Darwin wrote that he had no information in regard to the longevity of the nearest wild representatives of our domestic animals or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts whom Lankester addressed upon the subject informed him that almost nothing was known of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist, Gunther, said, “There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes of death of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them. Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is so short that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from ovum to ovum. There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much closer relation between the life span of individuals of the same than between those of different species, specific longevity meaning the average length of life of the individual of the species. Of all this we know far more of man than of any other creature.

If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all their lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet appear that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he should do if the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more favorable environment than nature and instinct have provided for him. Species, like individuals, very probably have a term of life and become extinct with age, as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But here, too, there is no sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant the generalizations so often met with concerning phyletic immortality or senescence. To some aspects of this theme I shall recur later in this volume.

Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know almost nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably also considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if again in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat simian Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon type he must have still further increased his longevity. But through all the paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H. F. Osborn calculates) there are no data either in the skeletal remains or in the implements he used that shed any clear light upon the subject; and the same is true of the neolithic cults that flowered in the lake- or pile-dwellings. Bones show different stages of development, and teeth, always remarkably well preserved, often show the effects of use; a very few represent children but not one illustrates extreme old age according to the osseous or dental criteria of modern times. Hence we may conjecture that the attainment of great age under the conditions of life then prevailing was very rare. It would seem also that if life had been long and its experiences well ripened, preserved, and transmitted (so that each new generation would not merely repeat the life of that which had preceded it but profit by its lessons), progress would not have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it might be urged perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now, most of the people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old early, and since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it would make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem premature to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who felt their physical powers beginning to abate--at least the more sagacious of them--had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and even increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom in counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of all this paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us. Nor do we see much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries--bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have been used, survives. Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost nothing of how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature, or in what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.

What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children only inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and to distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable to realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even kinship between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it was probably always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for himself as complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher forms of animal life with which his own was so intimately associated. Our ignorance of all these stages of human evolution becomes all the more pathetic as we are now coming to understand that it was then that all the deeper unconscious and dispositional strata of Mansoul, which still dominate us far more than we are even yet aware, were being laid down, and it is upon these traits that the later and conscious superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard things survive the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the softest of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.

Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and often contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive study of mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier stages of civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign language. Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives and, with Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and ideas of pubescent initiation; while animism, marriage rites, property and ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and trapping, war weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of the “medicine man,” dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems, language, fire-making, industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore, and many other themes have had comprehensive and comparative treatment. But I am able to find nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our most accomplished American scholar in this field, knows of nothing compendious) on old age in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has so far produced no gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of travel and exploration among the so-called lower races of mankind, only to find nothing or brief and more or less incidental mentions of senescence. This neglect is itself significant of the inconspicuous rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also of the lack of vital interest in the theme by investigators.

From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn of people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the Caspian Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the practice of devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most respectful method of disposing of their remains. In a few cases this custom is combined with that of killing both the old and sick, but it is more often simply a form of burial. It prevails in many parts of Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Reclus tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and sickly people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of it.” It is a matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.” Thereupon an oval pit is roughly excavated in a burial ground and filled with moss. Heavy stones are rolled near, the extremities of the victim are bound to two horizontal poles, and on the headstone a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in torrents over the moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red couch. In the twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the poles. Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends would pretend not to hear it. So his moriturus saluto is “Good night, friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance and open his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled to death in no time. Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are killed by being exposed; the old, by being deserted.

In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native, described the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said, catch otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they were killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts of their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be killed by friends and relatives.

Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer be of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox, accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut at a considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid in the middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company returns, deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing they can do to thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a burden.

With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit is ripe” and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing him to pieces and eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged are often cruelly treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the East African tribes the aged and all supposed to be at the point of death are slain and eaten. One author tells us that among the Fijians the practice of burying alive is “so common that but few old and decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert Spencer’s anthropological charts we are told that among the Chippewas “old age is the greatest calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is neglected and treated with disrespect.”

C. Wissler says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal practice of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other races.” On the other hand, among all hunting people who shift from place to place the infirm are often of necessity left behind to their fate. Yet the reported examples of such cruelties can usually be matched by instances of the opposite tenor. He goes on to say that since the mythologies of various tribal groups contain rites showing retribution for such cruelties we must regard them as, on the whole, exceptional.

S. K. Hutton says,

I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I would have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is, the Eskimo wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline, and few live long after sixty. I have known a few over seventy, and the people told me with wonderment about an old woman who lived to be eighty-two and who worked to the last. But these are great rarities. It must be a unique thing in one’s lifetime to meet with an Eskimo great-grandmother. The very old people seem always to be active to the last. They have an unusual amount of vitality and die in the harness, dropping out like those too tired to go any further and passing away without illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still scrape the seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger women lack; if they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they can sit behind a wall of snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the sleepy rock-cod through a hole.

C. A. Scott tells us that in certain south Australian tribes it is taboo to catch or eat certain animals until a man has reached a prescribed advanced age, these animals being easiest to catch and the most wholesome and thus best adapted to old people’s use. One of the chief maxims in Tonga is to reverence the gods, the chief, and old people. In Java, among the Iroquois, Dakotas, Comanches, the Hill tribes of India (Santals and Kukis), the Snakes and Zunis, much respect is shown to the aged.

K. Routledge says, “part of the deference paid to advancing years, whether in men or women, is due to fear. Old age has something uncanny about it, and old persons could probably ‘make medicine’ or work havoc, were they so inclined.” One chief said that in councils the old women would have their way because “it is a great work to have borne a child.” A young warrior is taught to get out of the road for an old woman. She does not, however, take part in the sacrifices, although one called herself the wife of God and seemed to have established a sort of cult. This was because she was a woman of much character. Here the mothers take full part in initiations. The dignity and self-reliance of the older women is remarkable. When a woman is so old that she has no teeth she is said to be “filled with intelligence” and on her death receives the high honor of burial instead of being thrown out to the hyenas.

A. L. Cureau tells us that the Negro is short-lived and that if some lucky star enables him to reach forty he becomes a man of importance, although death does not usually permit him to enjoy this distinction long. “During more than twenty years I never knew more than four or five who could have been considered sixty-five or seventy years of age, and even persons who were from fifty to sixty are very uncommon. At the age of thirty-five or forty they all exhibit signs of premature decrepitude.” He thinks the death rate from forty to forty-five very high. Disease among the Africans is limited to only a few general troubles. Burial is usually by interment, although in some districts the dead are eaten, while elsewhere they are thrown into the river or left lying on the ground in some remote spot. Respect for the chief, however, continues to be observed even after his death. But customs are growing mild, and “if human sacrifice still takes place in locations that are most remote from our stations, the fact is kept a profound secret.”

H. A. Junod gives a melancholy picture of old age, especially for the leading man of the tribe. His wives die, his glory fades, his crown loses its luster and if it is scratched or broken he cannot repair it, he is forsaken, less respected, and often only a burden unwillingly supported. “The children laugh at him. If the cook sends them to their lonely grandfather with his share of food in the leaky old hut, the young rascals are capable of eating it on the way, pretending afterwards that they did what they were told.” When, between two huts, under the shelter of the woods the old man warms his round-shouldered back in the rays of the sun, lost in some senile dream, his former friends point to him and say, “It is the bogie man, the ogre.” Mature people show little more consideration for the old than do the young ones. Junod knew personally an old man and woman who, when their children moved to another part of the country, were left under a roof with no sides, without food, and were almost imbecile. “In times of war old people die in great numbers. During the movements of panic they are hidden in the woods, in the swamps or palm trees, while all the able-bodied population runs away. They are killed by the enemy, who spare no one, or they die in their hiding places of misery and hunger. Thus the evening of life is very sad for the poor Thonga.” There are, however, children who to the end show devotion to their parents. Those old people are most to be pitied who fall to the charge of remote relatives.

A. Hrdlicka says, “The proportion of nonagenarians, and especially centenarians, among the Indians is far in excess of that among native white Americans.” As to the source of error, he thinks this is somewhat offset by the “marked general interest centering about the oldest of every tribe.” He found twenty-four per million among the Indians as against three per million among native whites who had reached a hundred, and says, “The relative excess of aged persons (80 years and above) among the Indians would signify only that the infirmities and diseases known ordinarily as those of old age are less grave among them, a conclusion in harmony with general observation.” Among the fifteen tribes embraced in this very careful and valuable investigation, Hrdlicka found in the old far less grayness and baldness and far better teeth than among the whites. They had more wrinkles but their muscular force was better preserved. Many debilitating effects among the whites are less so among the Indians. In general there is some bending and emaciation and the hair grows iron gray or yellowish-gray, but never white. Nor did he find among those of ninety a single one who was demented or helpless. The aged were generally more or less neglected, and had to care for themselves and help the younger. Owing to the diminution of the alveoli and adipose tissue, “the jaw looks more prominent, prognathism disappears, and the face looks shorter.” There is an increase in the nasal index, the nose becomes broader and shorter, the malar bones more prominent. The eyes lose their luster and generally become narrowed, with adhesions at the canthi, particularly the external. The hardening of arteries is certainly not common. Of 716 well preserved males of 65, only 4 per cent showed baldness; and among 377 women there was but one slightly bald, the baldness being about equally common on vertex and forehead.

In W. I. Thomas’s Source Book for Social Origins containing articles by various authors, we are told that among some of the Australian tribes old age is a very prominent factor in preëminence. After they have become feeble the old may have great authority, somewhat in proportion to what they know of ancient lore, magic, medicine, and especially if they are totem heads. Their authority is not patriarchal, and yet among the Yakuts, whether they are rich or poor, good or bad, the old are sometimes beaten by their children, especially if feeble-minded. On the other hand, a weak man of seventy may beat his forty-year-old son who is strong and rich but in awe of his parent because he has so much to inherit from him. The transfer of authority and property to the son often comes very late. The greatest number of suicides is among the old people. A man who beat his mother said, “Let her cry and go hungry. She made me cry more than once and beat me for trifles,” etc.

In this volume we are told, too, that even the Fuegians, who in times of scarcity kill and eat their old women for food, are generally affectionate, and until the whites interfered with their social order the old often had considerable authority. They sometimes prepare programs for ceremonials, which are very strictly observed by a hundred younger men. In some Australian tribes, too, a man’s authority generally increases with age; and this is true, though less frequently, of women. The old enforce the strictest marriage rules and have much influence over the thoughts and feelings of the tribes. The old men often sit in a circle and speak on public matters, one after another, the young men standing outside in silence. A few old men may retire to discuss secret matters of importance. Offenders are often brought before them for trial and sentence. The old men of a tribe often band themselves together and by working on the superstitions of the tribe secure for themselves not only comfort but unbounded influence. In the famous Duk-Duk ceremonial they alone were in the secret, and all others were impressed with the supernatural character of the actors in these rites.

Ploss and Bartels amplify the great changes senescence brings to women. Age not only obliterates race but sex. It often makes the most beautiful into the most ugly, for handsome old women among primitives are unknown. Children dread them. They often become careless of looks, the hand is claw-like, etc. A widespread German superstition is that if an old woman crosses the path of a hunter he will get nothing. They are ominous for marriages and some neurotics cannot look at them. They are sometimes said to have seven lives. Hans Sachs in poetry and Cranach in painting, in describing the fountains of youth, represent chiefly old women entering on the one side with every sign of decrepitude and coming out on the other beautiful, with wonderful toilets, and sometimes immediately engaging in orgies. Old women in early times sometimes had a guild, devised means of conjuration, made pacts or leagues with the devil, presided over the Walpurgis festivals, conjured with magic words, had evil eyes, knew strange brews, sometimes committed all kinds of lasciviousness with devils, might transform themselves into shapes as attractive as Circe for Ulysses or Medea for Jason, or take the more ominous forms of Hecate and Lamea. These maleficent creatures often allied themselves with black cats, serpents, owls, bats, had their salves and witch sabbaths, etc.

Frazer approaches this subject from a different angle. In the second chapter of his volume entitled The Dying God he tells us that in Fiji self-immolation is by no means rare, and the Fijians believe that as they leave this life they will remain ever after. This is a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude or from a crippled condition by voluntary death. “The custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is connected with their superstitions regarding a future life.” To this must be added the contempt that attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults that await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. So when a man feels age creeping on, so that he can no longer fully discharge the duties or enjoy the pleasures of life, he calls his relations, tells them he is worn out and useless, that they are ashamed of him, and he is determined to be buried. So on an appointed day they meet and bury him alive. In the New Hebrides the aged were buried alive at their own request. “It was considered a disgrace to a family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.” A Jewish tribe of Abyssinia never let a person die a natural death, for if any of their relatives was near expiring the priest of the tribe was called to cut his throat. If this ceremony was omitted, they believed the departed soul had not entered the mansions of the blessed. Heraclitus thought that the souls of those who die in battle are purer than those who die of disease. In a South American tribe, when a man is at the point of death his nearest relatives break his spine with an axe, for to die a natural death is the greatest misfortune. In Paraguay, when a man grows weary of life, a feast is made, with revelry and dancing, and the man is gummed and feathered with the plumage of many birds and a huge jar is fixed in the ground, the mouth of which is closed over him with baked clay. Thus he goes to his doom “more joyful and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”

With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another tribe he requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him, choosing the manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors assemble and he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere, if a man dies a natural death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he may seem to be received with the same honors in the next world as if he had died in battle, as Odin wanted for his disciples. The Wends once killed their aged parents and other kinsfolk and boiled and ate their bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die thus rather than drag out a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings are killed when their strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if their pontiff died a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained it by his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing vigor the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should die.” So the king who showed signs of illness or failing strength was put to death.

One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and suffocation.

This custom persisted till five generations ago.

Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while he was yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to death. According to the common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had a right thus to fight the king in possession, and if he succeeded in killing him he reigned in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only take place by night with any prospect of success. Then, according to custom, his guards had to be dismissed; so the hours of darkness were of special peril. It was a point of honor for the king not to call his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at which the king was killed would seem to have been commonly between forty and fifty. The Zulus put a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles and gray hair. Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a fixed term, perhaps because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest symptom of decay.

A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture. He tells us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a primeval rock jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king watched all night with drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself sooner or later be slain by his successor, for this was the rule of the sanctuary. The candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by one stronger or craftier. Although he held the title of king, no crowned head was ever uneasier. The least relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had no parallel in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies show the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences, the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence we must study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer tells us that the object of his book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once, only a runaway slave could break off the mistletoe from the oak, and success in this enabled him to fight the priest in single combat; if he won he would become King of the Woods.

There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 et seq. the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Cainan, 970; Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969; Lamech, 777. All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90--Adam at 130, Methuselah at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all modern scholars these great ages have been regarded as mythical, but so scientific and modern a student as T. E. Young, who is very skeptical about all later records of great longevity, devotes a long chapter to these records, which he is almost inclined to credit. He goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses, epitomizes diverse writers on the subject, and finally raises the question whether or not in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different and more uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented prolongation of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient literature of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand years and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life of saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as measured by length of life is slowly but irresistibly waning.

The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is a factor never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of juices. Perhaps the energy of the sun is decreasing and also the productivity of the earth. Indeed, it is very probable that the solar system has attained its maturity or midway stage. From such data Young concludes, “The average intellectual condition of the present period, I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no sign whatever of an ampler development.” Knowledge has become mechanical and has lost its capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation. The highest faculties are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent function. Man has reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also hindrances, so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.

The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient of days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age, this trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus, who died in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect for age, and many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of the prophets were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this has its nursery echo in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom little children came out of the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou bald-head.” He “turned back and cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.” No passage in all the literature of the world has had such influence as Psalms 90:10. It is pathetic to see how incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old age and how not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not more, among the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a decree of fate.

Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version, with his explanations in parentheses:

Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the years draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere is darkened the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of the day, and the moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early manhood), and the stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in mature age), and the clouds return after the rain (for the old, clouds and rainy days increase); when the keepers of the house (hands) tremble, and the men of power (the bones, especially the backbone) bend themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease and the ladies that look out through the lattices (eyes) are darkened; the doors are shut toward the street (secretion and excretion cease); he riseth at the voice of the birds (awakens too early), and all the daughters of song are brought low (grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and fears are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed), the silver (spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl (brain) crushed in, the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows weak), and the wheel breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs down). Man is going to his eternal house (the grave), and the mourners go about in the street. Vanity of vanities (all is transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, and all that is coming is vanity.

L. Löw collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud, German and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old which ancient Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that sight sometimes comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes cases where wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful shade and increased in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay, have sometimes grown from new roots--occasionally more than once. In many cases sex potency has been restored as well as muscular strength, freshness of complexion, and, more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course, of many races detail cases where magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a hundred, years has converted age into youth, and in Semitic folklore this is often connected with the passage, “The righteous shall renew their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were perhaps even more fond than other people of dividing life into periods, usually in conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of age with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps mention Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four temperaments. For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of excitation, the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of impulse to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic and emotionally characterized by Stimmungen. It judges the items of experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates readily and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric, practical, executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas and even phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old age is phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to abate the life of affectivity and take the attitude of laissez faire.

In the modern Jewish family the authority of and respect for the father is great, more among the orthodox and conservative than the liberal and reformed wing of Judaism. The grandfather and -mother are always provided for, although their authority and influence are generally greatly diminished.

Perhaps mention should here be made of the very interesting medieval legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, although it is of Christian origin. This cobbler, past whose shop Jesus bore the Cross on the way to Calvary, reproached Him, and Jesus, turning, sentenced him to “tarry till I come,” which meant that his punishment was to remain alive on earth until the second coming of the Messiah. In some of the many forms of this tradition he is represented at the time as being of about Jesus’ age and every time he reached a hundred as being set back again to this stage of life; while in others he is described with ever increasing symptoms of age, and in Doré’s illustrations he is depicted as wandering the earth, appearing here and there and, when recognized, generally mysteriously vanishing, ever seeking death, visiting graveyards and regions smitten with plague and famine, rushing into the mêlée of battles, etc.--but all in vain. He longs with an ever increasing passion to pay the debt of nature but is unable to do so and must rove the earth until the Judgment Day, when he hopes his penalty may be remitted and that he may keep some “rendezvous with Death.”

In ancient Greece we may begin with Sparta and its very unique gerousia, the council of twenty-eight old men who must be over sixty, when the duty to bear arms ceased and when by the original law of Sparta men were put to death. This council of old men at the height of its power is sometimes compared with that of the boulé in Athens but was even greater, for although it held its mandate from the people and its members were annually elected, they could depose the five ephors and the kings and even cause them to be put to death. J. P. Mahaffy condemns the parochial politics of Sparta, where ignorant old men watched over and secured the closest adhesion of the state to the system of a semifabulous legislator, and compares the rigidity of the Spartan system, not based on written laws, with the effects of excessive reverence of ancestors in China in retarding progress. He thinks that here we have “one of the most signal instances in history of the vast mischief done by the government of old men. All the leading patriots, nay all the leading politicians, were past their prime. There was not a single young man of ability taking part in public affairs.” This, he thinks, was more or less true of Athens in the early days, and he goes on to say that if any young orator tried to advance new ideas, the old masters, who had the ear of the assembly, were out upon him as a hireling and traitor so that he had to retire from the agora into private life, and some were thus driven into exile. He even holds that the sudden growth of the philosophic schools a little later was due to the activities that but for this diversion would have been directed to politics.

But in Greece at its best opposite influences were at work and generally predominated. In the Homeric age “the king or chief, as soon as his bodily vigor passed away, was apparently pushed aside by younger and stronger men. He might either maintain himself by extraordinary usefulness, like Nestor, or be supported by his children, if they chanced to be affectionate and dutiful; but except in these cases his lot was sad indeed.” Achilles laments that nearby chiefs are ill-treating the aged Peleus, and we see Laertes, the father of Ulysses, exiled to a barren farm in the country and spending the later years of his life in poverty and hardship. Hence when we see princes who had sons that might return any day to avenge them treated in such a way, we must infer that unprotected old age commanded very little veneration among the Homeric Greeks, so that worn-out men received scant consideration. Among friends and neighbors in peace and in good humor they were treated with consideration, but with the first clash of interests all this vanished. Interference of the gods to protect their weakness was no longer believed in. Thus the exact prescription of the conduct of the young toward the elders in Sparta was an exception, and their treatment of old age as illustrated by the well-worn story of an old man coming into the theater at Athens and looking in vain for a seat until he came near the Spartan embassy, which at once rose and made room for him, was suggestive. It was well added that while the Athenians applauded this act it is doubtful if they imitated it. Probably the disparagement of old age prompted Athenian gentlemen to resort to every means to prolong their youth. Zeus came to rule the turbulent and self-willed lesser gods on Olympus, who were perpetually trying to evade and thwart him, by occasionally terrifying them, and he seemed to be able to count on no higher principle of loyalty.

The Greeks loved wealth because it gave pleasure, and perhaps in this fact we have one key to another horror that old age had for them. Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age with its pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares besiege the mind; nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun but are hateful to boys and despised among women, so sore a burden have the gods made old age.” “When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream, forthwith this burdensome and hideous old age looms over us hateful and dishonored, which changes the fashion of man’s countenance, marring his sight and his mind with its mist.” Pindar asks why those who must of necessity meet the fate of death should desire “to sit in obscurity vainly brooding through a forgotten old age without sharing a single blessing.” He and Aeschylus take a somewhat less unfavorable view of age, although even Pindar calls it “detested.” Sophocles is the only dramatist who, at least in one passage, welcomes its approach, although there are nowhere bitterer words concerning it than those of the chorus of Œdipus at Coloneus, “That is the final lot of man, even old age, hateful, impotent, unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of evil dwells.” Thus, in general, Greek writers take a very gloomy view of it, never calling it beautiful, peaceful, or mellow, but rather dismal and oppressive. The best they say of it is that it brings wisdom.

R. W. Livingstone says:

When youth wore away, he [the Greek] felt that what made life most worth living was gone. In part perhaps it was that old age had terrors for the Greeks which we do not feel. They were without eyeglasses, ear-trumpets, bath-chairs, and an elaborate system of apéritifs, which modern science has devised to assist our declining years. Yet even with these consolations it may be doubted whether the Greek would have faced old age with pleasure. At least to judge from Greek literature, he lamented its minor discomforts less than the loss of youth’s intense capacity for action and enjoyment. People who prize beauty and health so highly can hardly think otherwise when age comes.

Again, old men in Greece had to contend with the younger generation upon even terms and without the large allowance conceded them by modern sentiment and good manners. At Athens legal proceedings of children to secure the property of their parents were very common--and that, too, without medical evidence of incapacity. Aristophanes complains of the treatment of older men by the newer generation and in his Wasps makes an old man say that his only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so exacting homage from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. When he comes home with his fee they are glad to see him. Indeed, thus he might support a second wife and younger children and not be dependent for his daily bread upon his son’s steward. In the tragedies the old kings are represented as acquiescing, though not without complaint, in the weakness of their position and submitting to insults from foes and rivals. There seems no such thing as patient submission for an aged sovereign. Nor did his own excellence nor the score of former battles secure for him the allegiance of his people when his vigor had passed. This was all because in spite of the modicum of respect that all must yield to old age at its best, the violent nature of the Periclean politics and the warlike temper of early days made vigor in their leaders a necessity. The nation was strong, always seeking to advance and enlarge, and its maxim seemed to be that of Hesiod, “Work for youth; counsel for maturity; prayers for old age.” The Greeks, realizing the danger of relying too much upon experience as the source of wisdom, saw that when the maturity of age is passed and the power of decision begins to wane, trusting to the leadership of the old may be dangerous. By a law often relied on, old men could be brought into court by their children and be found incapable of managing their property, which was then transferred to their heirs; and this helps to explain why sometimes old people, beginning to feel their uselessness, committed suicide rather than become an encumbrance.

Plato makes one of his characters say:

I and a few other people of my own age are in the habit of frequently meeting together. On these occasions most of us give way to lamentations and regret the pleasures of youth, and call up the memory of love affairs, drinking parties, and similar proceedings. They are grievously discontented at the loss of what they consider great privileges and describe themselves as having lived well in those days whereas now they can hardly be said to live at all. Some also complain of the manner in which their relations insult their infirmities or make this a ground for reproaching old age with the many miseries it occasions them.

Plato did not himself agree with this view but thought the cause of this discontent lay not in age itself but in character. Still the humanist view of life does tend to some such position, and the Greeks really felt that it was better to be the humblest citizen of Athens than to rule in Hades.

Two unique characters stand out with great clearness and significance. The first is that of the Homeric Nestor, who had lived through three generations of men and in whom Anthon says Homer intended to exemplify the greatest perfection of which human nature is capable. His wisdom was great, as was his age, and both grew together. In his earlier years he had been as great in war as he became in counsel later. Very different is the figure of Tithonus, whom Tennyson has made the theme of one of his oft-quoted poems. He was a mortal, the son of a king, but Aurora became so enamored of him that she besought Zeus to confer upon him the gift of immortality. The ruler of Olympus granted her prayer and Tithonus became exempt from death. But the goddess had forgotten to crave youth along with immortality and accordingly, after his children had been born, old age slowly began to mar the visage and form of her lover and spouse. When she saw him thus declining she still remained true to him, kept him “in her palace, on the eastern margin of the Ocean stream, ‘giving him ambrosial food and fair garments.’ But when he was no longer able to move his limbs she deemed it the wisest course to shut him up in his chamber, whence his feeble voice was incessantly heard. Later poets say that out of compassion she turned him into a cicada.”

It is gratifying to turn from the depressing attitude toward old age that was characteristic of the Hellenic mind as a whole, because it came nearer than any other to being the embodiment of eternal youth, and to glance at the unique and, we must believe on the whole, very wholesome and suggestive relation that so often subsisted between men, not to be sure very old (unless in the case of Socrates) but aging and young men and even boys.

It was assumed that every well-born and -bred young male must have an older man as his mentor and to be without one was, to some degree, regarded as discreditable. Thus juniors sometimes came to vie with each other in their efforts to win the regard of their seniors, especially if they were prominent; while the latter, in turn, felt that it was a part of their duty to the community and to the state to respond to such advances, even to make them. These friendships between ephebics and sages were, at their best, highly advantageous to both. The man embodied the boy’s ideal at that stage of life when he realized that all excellencies were not embodied in his father and when home relations were merging into those of citizenship. To win the personal attention and interest of a great man who would occasionally exercise the function of teacher, foster parent, guardian, godfather, adviser, or patron, brought not only advantage but distinction if the youth was noble and beautiful. On the other hand, Plato thought no man would wish to do or say a discreditable thing in the presence of a youth who admired him but would wish to be a pattern or inspirer of virtue. He seems to have been the first to realize that there is really nothing in the world quite so worthy of love, reverence, and service, as ingenuous youth fired with the right ambitions and smitten with a passion to both know and be the best possible. The period between the dawn of sex and complete nubility has always been the chief opportunity of the true teacher or initiator of its apprentice into life.

Here we must recall the very pregnant sense in which, as I have tried in my Adolescence to set forth at greater length, education in its various implications began in the initiations of youth by their elders into the pubertal stage of life and slowly extended upward toward the university, and downward toward the kindergarten, as civilization advanced. The world has always felt that these pre-marital years, when the young have such peculiar needs and are subjected to so many dangers, are the great opportunity for the transmission of knowledge and influence from the older to the younger generation.

Thus while Socrates loved to mingle with men of all classes and ages, his most congenial companions were those of a younger generation. With the gracious boy, Charmides, “beautiful in mind and body, a charming combination of moral dignity and artless sprightliness,” he discussed temperance in the presence of his guardian, Critias. With Theætetus, “the younger Socrates,” like his master more beautiful in mind than in body, he conversed about the nature of knowledge, in the presence of his tutor. With the fair and noble young Lysis, invoked to do so by his lover, Hypothales, he discourses on the right words or acts best calculated to ingratiate himself with his ward, and the theme is friendship. In the presence and with the coöperation of four youths he discusses courage with General Laches, and to young Clineas and his adviser he narrates his amusing encounter with Euthydemus and his brother, the bumptious young Sophists, the “eristic sluggers.” He explains the true nature of his own art to Ion, the Homeric rhapsodist. In the Meno he brings out the essential points of the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid from the mind of an ignorant slave boy.

This relation of old and younger men was thought to keep youth plastic, docile, and receptive, if not a trifle feminine. Plato would have these pairs of friends fight side by side to inspire each other with courage. But this relation, as we all know, had its dangers and often lapsed to homosexuality and inversion. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, that most beautiful and alluring of male coquettes, describes Socrates as a paragon of chastity because he remained cold and unmoved by all the seductive blandishments he could bring to bear upon him. This vice, now so fully explored by Krafft-Ebing, Tarnowski, Moll, Ellis, and Freud and his disciples, is favored by war, the seclusion of women as in Turkey, and even by female virtue; but the Platonic view was that true love was a wisdom or philosophy, although possibly they did not realize that even the custom of the Sophists, who first took pay for teaching--a practice they thought profanation--was nevertheless a step toward the reform of degraded boy love.

The chief function of wise and older men toward their juniors, they thought, was to prevent the premature hardening of opinions into convictions and to keep their minds open and growing. As we now often say that the chief function of religion and sex is to keep each other pure, so they thought that wisdom culminated in eros, which in turn found its highest deployment in the love of knowledge, which Aristotle later described as the theoretic life, the attainment of which he deemed the supreme felicity of man. From all this it follows that those who achieve complete ideal senescence are those who have entirely sublimated eroticism into the passion for truth and pursue it with the same ardor that in their prime attracted them to the most beautiful of the other sex; and that their chief function to the next generation is to lay in it the foundations for the same gradual transfer and transformation of it as old age advances.

Aristotle’s physical theory of old age is that heat is lost by gradual dissipation, very little remaining in old age--a flickering flame that a slight disturbance could put out. The lung hardens by gradual evaporation of the fluid and so is unable to perform its office of heat regulation. He assumes that heat is gradually developed in the heart. The amount produced is always somewhat less than that which is given off and the deficiency has to be made good out of the stock with which the organism started originally, that is, from the innate heat in which the soul was incorporate. This eventually is so reduced by constant draughts made upon it that it is insufficient to support the soul. The natural span of life, he says, differs greatly in length in different species, due to material constitution and the degree of harmony with the environment. But still, as a general rule, big plants and animals live longer than smaller ones; sanguineous or vertebrates longer than invertebrates; the more perfect longer than the less perfect; and long gestation generally goes with long duration. Thus bulk, degree of organization, period of gestation, are correlated. Great size goes with high organization.

In his Rhetoric, as is well known, Aristotle gives old age an unfavorable aspect. He says in substance that the old have lived many years and been often the victims of deception, and since vice is the rule rather than the exception in human affairs, they are never positive about anything. They “suppose” and add “perhaps” or “possibly,” always expressing themselves in doubt and never positively. They are uncharitable and ever ready to put the worst construction upon everything. They are suspicious of evil, not trusting, because of their experience of human weakness. Hence they have no strong loves or hates but go according to the precept of bias. Their love is such as may one day become hate and their hatred such as may one day become love. The temper of mind is neither grand nor generous--not the former because they have been too much humiliated and have no desire to go according to anything but mere appearances, and not the latter because property is a necessity of life and they have learned the difficulty of acquiring it and the facility with which it may be lost. They are cowards and perpetual alarmists, exactly contrary to the young; not fervent, but cold. They are never so fond of life as on their last day. Again, it is the absent which is the object of all desire, and what they most lack they most want. They are selfish and inclined to expediency rather than honor; the former having to do with the individual and the latter being absolute. They are apt to be shameless rather than the contrary and are prone to disregard appearances. They are dependent for most things. They live in memory rather than by hope, for the remainder of their life is short while the past is long, and this explains their garrulity. Their fits of passion though violent are feeble. Their sensual desires have either died or become feeble but they are regulated chiefly by self-interest. Hence they are capable of self-control, because desires have abated and self-interest is their leading passion. Calculation has a character that regulates their lives, for while calculation is directed to expediency, morality is directed to virtue as its end. Their offenses are those of petty meanness rather than of insolence. They are compassionate like the young, but the latter are so from humanity while the old suppose all manner of sufferings at their door. When the orator addresses them he should bear these traits in mind. Elsewhere he says a happy old age is one that approaches gradually and without pain and is dependent upon physical excellence and on fortune, although there is such a thing as a long life even without health and strength.

Thus, on the whole, the Greeks took a very somber view of old age. They prized youth as perhaps no other race has ever done and loved to heighten their appreciation of it by contrasting it with life in its “sere and yellow leaf.” Pindar says in substance that darkness, old age, and death never seemed so black as by contrast with the glories of the great festivals and games which every few years brought together all those who loved either gold or glory. Socrates, who refused to flee from his fate and calmly drank hemlock at the age of seventy, and Plato, who lived to be an octogenarian, must, on the whole, be regarded as exceptions, and conceptions of a future life were never clear and strong enough to be of much avail against the pessimism that in bright Hellas clouded the closing scenes of life’s drama.

When we turn to Rome, we have, on the whole, a more favorable view. Even in the early stages of Roman life, family and parental authority were well developed and in Roman law the patria potestas gave the head of the family great dignity and power. This term designates the aggregate of those peculiar powers and rights that, by the civil law of Rome, belonged to the head of a family in respect to his wife, children (natural or adopted) and more remote descendants who sprang from him through males only. Anciently it was of very extensive scope, embracing even the power of life and death; but this was greatly curtailed until finally it meant but little more than a right of the paterfamilias to hold his own property or the acquisitions of one under his power.

The Roman Senate was, as the etymology of the word suggests, a body of old men; and as the Romans had an unprecedented genius for social and political organization, the wisdom necessary for exercising successfully administrative functions, which age alone can give, had greater scope. In this respect the Catholic Church later and its canon law were profoundly influenced by and, indeed, as Zeller has shown in his remarkable essay on the subject, derived most of its prominent features directly from the political organization of ancient Rome, also giving great authority to presbyters, elders, and affording exceptional scope to the organizing ability that comes to its flower in later life. Jesus was young and Keim believes that all His disciples were even younger. Those who created ecclesiastical institutions, however, were far older.

In Cicero’s De Senectute we have a remarkably representative statement put into the mouth of the old man, Cato, as to how aging Romans regarded their estate, and I think the chief impression in reading this remarkable document is the vast fund of instances of signal achievements of old men that are here brought together. This will be apparent from the following brief résumé.

Cato in his old age is approached by youths who want to know what he can tell them about life. He commends their interest in age and tells them he has himself just begun to learn Greek, on which he spent much time in later years. After the first few pages the treatise becomes almost entirely a monologue of Cato. Every state is irksome to those who have no support within and do not see that they owe happiness to themselves. We must not say old age creeps on after manhood, manhood after youth, youth after childhood, etc. Each age has its own interests--spring for blossoms, autumn for fruit. The wise submit and do not, like the giants, war against the gods. There are very many instances of those who outlived enjoyment and found themselves forsaken, but of more who won notable renown and respect. Perhaps the greatest merit of this book is the instances of noble old age that abound.

Many are great owing to the reputation of their country and would be small in other lands. To the very poor old age can never be very attractive. Think on your good deeds. When Marcus died, Cato long knew no other man to improve by. The four evils charged to old age are: (1) it disables from business, (2) it makes the body infirm, (3) it robs of pleasure, (4) it is near death. He takes these up in detail. The downfall of great states is “generally owing to the giddy administration of inexperienced young men”; and, on the contrary, tottering states have been saved by the old. The young are all ignorant orators. Memory fails in age only if not exercised, and this is true of all abilities. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus to defy those who called him a dotard. Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, and Cleanthes are cited. Many old men cannot submit to idleness but grow old learning something new every day, like Solon. Although the voice may be low, it may have more command. We should no more repine when middle life leaves us than we do when childhood departs. The adult does not mourn that he is no longer a boy. All must prepare themselves against old age and mitigate its natural infirmities.

The stage delights in weak, dissolute old fellows worthy of contempt and ridicule. Age must support its proper rights and dignities and not give them weakly away. We must recall at night all we have said or done during the day. As to the third, old age being incapable of pleasure, the great curse is indulgence of passion, for which men have betrayed their country. Governments have been ruined by treachery, for lust may prompt to any villainy. Reason is the best gift of heaven, but the highest rapture of feeling makes reflection impossible. Cato then describes with much detail the charm of country life--Cincinnatus, etc. We might well wish our enemies were guided by pleasure only for then we could master them more easily. The old man is dead to certain enjoyments. He does not so much prize the convivium for food as for talk. We must not choose only companions of our own age for there will be few of these left. A talk should turn to the subjects proposed by the master of the feast, the cups be cooling. He says “I thank the gods I am got rid of that tyranny” (venery). He does not want or even wish it in any form.

Far above the delights of literature or philosophy are the charms of country life, and he describes at length the various methods of vine culture, fertilization, improving barren soil, irrigation, orchards, cattle, bees, gardens, flowers, tree planting, etc. The farmer can say, like the ancient Semites when offered gold, that they wanted none for it was more glorious to command those who valued it than to possess it. Then follow many instances of old people who have retired to the country and perhaps even have been called from their farms to great tasks of state. He advises reading Xenophon. An old age thus spent is the happiest period if attended with honor and respect. Old men are miserable if they demand the defense of oratory. In the college of augurs old men have great dignity. Some wines sour with age but others grow better and richer. A gravity with some severity is allowed, but never ill nature. Covetousness is most absurd because what is left of life needs little.

The young should be trained to envisage death. Youth in its greatest vigor is subjected to more diseases than old age. If men too young governed the state, all government would fall. The old have already attained what the young only hope for, namely, long years. No actor can play more than one rôle at once. It takes more water to put out a hot fire than a spent one. The young are more prone to die by violence, the old by over-ripeness. The old can oppose tyrants because these can only kill; and their life, being shorter, is worth far less. The young and old should meditate on death till it becomes familiar and this only makes the mind free and easy. Many a soldier has rushed into the mêlée, with no result, when he knew he would be cut to pieces, and Marcus Atilius Regulus went back to his enemies for certain torture and death because he had promised. There is a certain satiety of each stage of life, and always one is fading as another warms up.

Perhaps, Cato concludes, our minds are an efflux of some universal mind, and there may be an argument for preëxistence. We have not only interest in, but a kind of right to, posterity. The wisest accept death most easily, although it is by no means clear whether we are dissolved or there is a personal continuation.

Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and Onomocritus, an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even entire families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny tells us of a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that in the Punjab people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three centuries pass. Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian, statistics of all centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were collected, there were more than a hundred and seventy of them out of a population of three million, six of whom lived over 150 years. According to Lucian, Tiresias lived 600 years on account of the purity of his life, and the inhabitants of Mount Ethos had the faculty of living a century and a half. He tells us of an Indian race, the Seres who, because of temperate life and very scanty food, lived 300 years, while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king of Cyprus who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among mortals for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes all others and tells of people who lived thousands of years.

Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.

Roger Bacon tells us of a remarkable man who appeared in Europe in 1245 and in whom everyone was interested. He claimed that he had attended the Council of Paris in A.D. 362 and also the baptism of Clovis. Bacon’s skepticism reduced the claim of this unknown man to 300 years. In 1613 was published at Turin the life of a man who is said to have lived nearly 400 years, enjoying full use of all his faculties; and in the seventeenth century a Scotchman, MacCrane, lived 200 years and talked of the Wars of the Roses. So the lives of the saints are rich in old people--St. Simeon is said to have lived 107 years; St. Narcissus, 165; St. Anthony, 105; the hermit, Paul, 113; while the monks of Mount Ethos often reached the age of 150, as did the first bishop of Ethiopia. Although there are, of course, no vital statistics, there are many reasons to believe that the average length of human life was shorter and that old people in general, although, of course, not without remarkable exceptions, enjoyed little respect. Descriptions of them sometimes appear in miracle plays, more commonly in the form of caricatures, as is often the case on the modern stage, where the personification of old people is often a specialty. There are dotards and fatuities galore and the more dignified figures like King Lear or even Shylock are represented as morally perverse or mentally unsound.

Here should be mentioned the remarkable theory of witchcraft elaborated by Karl Pearson. W. Notestein tells us that by accounting as carefully as the insufficient evidence permits it would seem that “about six times as many women were indicted as men,” and also that there were “twice as many married women as spinsters,” which is less in accord with tradition. From his account, as well as from the old chapter of C. Mackay on the “Witch Mania” (in his Popular Delusions) and also from an interesting study by G. L. Kittredge, it would seem that the first accusations of witchcraft were made against old, middle-aged, and young women almost indiscriminately, while in a later stage of the delusion attention focused on old women, influenced by folklore, which tends to make them hags.

Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft is a revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman not only ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius, and paternity was unknown. The key to this older civilization was the development of woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of child-bearing and -rearing. The mother-age in its diverse forms has been a stage of social growth for probably all branches of the human race. With its mother-right customs it made a social organization in which there was more unity of interest, fellowship, partnership in property and sex than we find in the larger social units of to-day. Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age, despite the fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows that those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code may help to police but can never reform society.

Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft are fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites and customs of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the confessions wrung from poor old women by torture have a real scientific value for the historian of a far earlier stage of life. Primitive woman, thus, once had a status far higher and very different from anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband and father had no place but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate were depositaries of tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,” “sibyl,” or “witch” passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She domesticated the small animals--goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff, spindle, pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided over rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances and ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some were good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck; the latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and a descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst of the assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain. Tacitus tells us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in female attire. Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for dedicating a church, although it has many features of the celebration of a goddess, who in Christian demonology was first converted into the devil’s mother or grandmother and invested with most of the functions of old witches. These, in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve upon her son. In Swabia the witch stone is an old altar and the ceremonies about it suggest marriage. The devil is a professional sweetheart; his mother, a person of great importance, was supposed once to have built a palace on the Danube, to hunt with black dogs, and to be related to Frau Holda. She watered the meadows in “Twelfth Night” and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s mother is only a degraded form of the goddess of fertility and domestic activity and her worship was once associated not only with licentiousness but with human sacrifice. It was these women who were primarily in league with the devil and once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman of the woods who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the labors of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn that she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of the priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes exhibit for marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but group marriage.

Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the weak and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of which lurk under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the rudiments of medicine, domestication of small animals, cultivation of vegetables, domestic and household arts, the pitchfork--which was once the fire-rake--etc. All of these are woman’s inventions and were necessary for the higher discoveries. Although he did not invent them, man later made woman use them. The primitive savage knows nothing of agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his wife does. It is not he but she who made these symbols of a female deity. The fertility, resource, and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle she had to make for the preservation of herself and her child. Man was quickened by warfare of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first struggle was for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate form of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination. He thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious worship of the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and he finds survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus this early civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs and knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man has not yet entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges of the mother age, many in his represent a still lower stratum and the drudgery of the peasant woman in many parts of Europe represents the extreme of the reaction brought about by male dominance.

Otis T. Mason and A. F. Chamberlain have stressed the significance of woman’s work in the early stages of the development of the human race, and if it be true that in witchcraft we have a recrudescence of the reactions of man to this preëminence of the other sex, in which woman in her least attractive form--all shriveled, toothless, and as a vicious trouble-maker--is caricatured in the long war of sex against sex, we certainly have here considerable confirmation of some of the views now represented by John M. Tyler that prehistoric woman led mankind in the early stages of its upward march toward civilization. In the eternal struggle of old people to maintain their power against the oncoming generations which would submerge or sweep them away, witchcraft on this view represents the very latest stage of a long and losing struggle of old women for place and influence who in the last resort did not scruple, handicapped though they were by ugliness, neglect, and contempt, to cling to the least and last remnants of their ancient prerogatives.

The attitude of children toward old people is interesting and significant, but it is very difficult to distinguish between their own indigenous and intrinsic feelings and the conventionalities of respect and even the outer forms of convention that society has imposed upon them. Many children live with their grandparents and the attitude of the latter toward the former makes, of course, a great difference. Both, especially grandmothers, are prone to be over-indulgent and often allow children greater liberties than the mother would--under the influence, doubtless, of the very strong instinct to win their good-will. But it is very doubtful if the average child loves the grandmother as much as it is loved by her.

Colin Scott obtained 226 reminiscent answers from adults on the question of how as children they felt toward old people and found little difference in the sexes in this respect. No less than eighty per cent expressed negative or pessimistic views; that is, they disliked old people because they could not run and play; because they were sometimes cross, solemn, stupid, conceited; perhaps were thought to envy the young or interfere with childish pleasures, etc.; while not a few expressed points of aversion to wrinkles, unsteady gait, untidiness in dress and habits (particularly of eating), slowness, uncertain voice, loss of teeth, bad pronunciation, etc. Only twenty per cent took a favorable view of old people, regarding them as wise, not only about the weather but about other things; as free to do what they wished; having great power as storytellers; constantly doing little acts of kindness and sometimes interceding with parents in their behalf. For the majority of young children the pleasures of life seem to be essentially over at forty and they look upon people of that age as already moribund. Very often children are overcome by a sudden sense of pathos that old people are facing death, the process of which with lowered vitality seems to them to have already begun. To some, the very aged, even conventionally loved, are inwardly repulsive because their weakness and appearance already begin to seem a little corpse-like; while a few, on the other hand, are animated by the motive to make old people happy because their life seems to them so short or because little things please them so much. It would almost seem from such data as though the modern child was not sufficiently accustomed to grandparents to have fully adjusted to them; and, as everyone knows, there is a very strong and instinctive tendency in children to jeer at and perhaps attempt ludicrous imitations of old age. At any rate, we have here two tendencies evidently in greater or less conflict with each other.

Mantegazza collected very many views from literature concerning old age and death and grouped them in two classes, favorable and unfavorable. The majority of his quotations stigmatize it as repulsive, crumpled in skin and form, perhaps tearful, squinting, with mottled skin, loose, distorted teeth, emaciation sometimes suggesting a skeleton, hardness of hearing, croaking voice, knotted veins, hemorrhoids, tending to drift into an apologetic attitude for living like a beggar asking alms or craving pity, with no strong desires, etc., so that even those who love old people in the bottom of their hearts often do not want them around. These quotations stress the garrulousness, untidiness in table manners, carelessness in dress or toilet, moodiness, exacting nature, and disparagement of present times in always lauding the past. “Old age is pitiable because although life is not attractive, death is dreaded.” People sometimes “seem to themselves and to others to live on because the gods do not love them.” Life is often described as a “long sorrow, the last scene of which is always death.” “There are only three events--to be born, live, and die. A man does not feel it when he is born but through life he suffers and death is painful, and then he is forgotten.” “Every tick of the clock brings us nearer to death.” “We part from life as from the house of a host and not from our own home.” “One after another our organs refuse their service and collapse.” “All that lives must die, and all that grows must grow old.” “Death begins in the cradle.” “The harbor of all things good or bad is death.” “The elements are in constant conflict with man, slowly demolishing everything he does and in the end annihilating him.”

On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that God has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as long as we live it is not present and when it is present we are not there. Pliny said the gods have given us nothing more to be desired than brevity of life. Others say that the old may have weak bodies but normally have good will and this compensates. Others stress the dignity of age or its steadfastness, its fondness for children and the young. Sometimes the old become epicures in eating and connoisseurs in drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition the desire of the old to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others think the love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental. He suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to fit to new conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and he says that of the three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think of it at all, the recourse of the common and the weak, (2) belief in immortality, a very pleasing and comforting delusion, and (3) to face and get familiar with it, the last is by far the highest and hardest. Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle and fragile as glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from slighter causes and recover more slowly, must especially guard against colds, fatigue, change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to accept others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their condition but work out those best for themselves.

In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of the tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or less sharply marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a comprehensive survey of this subject. There has never been, however, any general agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely, the beginning and the end of sex life, which divides life into three stages. Child life, as we all know, has lately been divided into various epochs--the nursling; the pre-school age; the quadrennium from eight to twelve; puberty; the age of attaining majority; nubility; the acme of physical ability (for example, for athletes circa thirty); the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed between forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own; the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare:

The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Our educational curricula are still far more logical in the sequence of their subject matter and their method than they are genetic whereas they should be essentially the latter, as will be the case when the paidocentric viewpoint has become paramount, as it should, over the scholiocentric. We have made much progress since Herbart in determining true culture stages, and while there are very many exceptions to the law that in general the individual recapitulates the stages of the race, this great principle has far wider scope than we have yet recognized. Again, we have made great progress along another line, namely, in distinguishing physiological and especially psychological from chronological age, but here we have little consensus of either method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer of life can fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the whole, greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they advance along the scale of years. Some minds are young and growing at seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years of life--physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is reached and passed. Happily, however, we do have both vestiges and modern recrudescences of such a view in the field of religion, as may be briefly illustrated in the following paragraphs.

Many have held with DuBuy, that different religions best fitted different ages. He believes that Confucianism, with its stress on respect for parents and ancestors and on the cultivation of practical virtues, best fits the nature and needs of young children; that Mohammedanism, with its passionate monotheism, has a certain affinity for the next stage of life; Christianity is best from adolescence on to the age when the marriage relation is at its apex; Buddhism comes next; and Brahmanism is for old age.

Max Müller says that in very ancient India it was recognized “that the religion of a man cannot and ought not to be the same as that of a child, and that the religious ideas of an old man must differ from those of an active man in the world. It is useless to attempt to deny such facts,” and we are reminded that we all have to struggle and have to pass through many stages of clearing up childish conceptions in this field. Most cultivated men come out of these struggles with certain rather firm convictions, but these later may be found to need revision.

But when the evening of life draws near and softens the light and shade of conflicting opinion, when to agree with the spirit of truth within becomes far dearer than to agree with a majority of the world without, the old questions appeal once more like long forgotten friends. The old man learns to bear with those from whom formerly he differed, and while he is willing to part with all that is non-essential--and most religious differences seem to arise from non-essentials--he clings all the more firmly to the few strong and solid planks that are left to carry him into the harbor no longer very distant from his sight. It is hardly creditable how all other religions have overlooked these simple facts, how they have tried to force on the old and wise the food that was meant for babes, and how they have thereby alienated and lost their best and strongest friends. It is therefore a lesson all the more worth learning from history that one religion at least, and one of the most ancient and powerful and most widely spread religions, has recognized this fact without the slightest hesitation.

According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a teacher or Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way and who teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and his religious duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and believer. At the next stage the man is married and must perform all the duties prescribed for the householder. But during both these periods no doubt is ever heard as to the truth of religion or the authority of laws and rites. But when the hair turns white and there are grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father of the family may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with or without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity of performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain self-denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then allowed to meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life and death, and for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,” to learn the doctrines in which all sacrificial duties are rejected, and the very gods to whom the ancient prayers of the Veda were addressed are put aside to make room for the one supreme impersonal being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like some medieval hermit-saints commemorated in the voluminous hagiology of the Bollandist Fathers, were reputed to have often attained very great age and wisdom and to be sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by men still in active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have undergone a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a true mundane immortality.

Thus the religion of childhood and manhood for the venerable sage is transmuted into philosophy or meditation on the most general problems and the very nature of not only life but being itself, that Plato described as the cult of death. The old man, thus, in the classic days of ancient India directed his thoughts toward absorption. His religion was pantheism, and the theme of his contemplation was the source of all things and their return to this source as their goal. Perhaps we might now say that according to this view, if evolution is the inspiration of the intellect in its youth and its prime, involution was its muse in the stages of decline as it awaited resumption into the One-and-All. Modern pragmatists, like the best of the ancient Sophists, hold that the truth that best fits and expresses Me is and must be held with the completest conviction, and the genetic idea is that different philosophies and different faiths fit and express not only different temperaments but different stages of life, and that, therefore, creeds can never be fixed and stationary but must be constantly transformed. There is no absolute or final form of truth for all save in the dominion of pure mathematical and physical science, and it is one of the most tragic aspects of our modern culture that we so often find mature and even aging men and women arrested in infantile or juvenile stages of their development in regard to the larger problems of life, for where and just in proportion as the latter is intense there is incessant change. Christianity is the best of all religions through the entire stage of the vita sexualis from its inception to its decline. Its essence is the sublimation of love. It is the religion of personalization culminating in the faith in another individual life. It is not the religion for old men, and the revival of its attitudes, which we often see in them, is a phenomenon of arrest or reversion and not one of the advance that senescence should mark if the last stage of life is to have its complete unfoldment.

Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation of society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend to be progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that no good thing of the past be lost. Indeed, this is often called the most natural and wholesome basis of division into parties, religious as well as political. In a sense there is eternal war between the old and young, as illustrated, for example, by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The young are always inclined to brush aside their elders and are psychologically incapable of taking their point of view. So in many a mixed assemblage we have a clash of temperaments that divides fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. In some Australian tribes there is an absolute dominance of the elders, and among some American Indians of the plain there is incessant antagonism between the young braves eager to distinguish themselves in raids against hostile tribes and the older chiefs seeking to prevent a hazardous war. F. Schurtz thinks this antagonism between the older and younger generation, which separates parents from children, forms the germ of classifications of age and is the oldest type of associated groups. Lowie, however, does not think that the kind of age groupings found in such cultures have a purer natural basis but rather that they represent a blending of psychological and conventional factors. It is very hard to transcend the intuitions of one’s years. Where these segmentations occur they may or may not be fully organized, but they generally go back to a more primitive social division into boys, bachelors, and married men, very common among savages. More elaborated age distinctions probably arose a little later.

R. S. Bourne also realizes that there is always a half-conscious war going on between the old and the young and believes this is a wholesome challenge that both should recognize to justify themselves. Older men should not be led captive by the younger and should neither over-emphasize nor waive their own cherished convictions, which are the best results of age and experience. To-day the older generation is more inclined to stress duty and service and to hark back to Victorian ideals. Perhaps in general they tend a little to over-individuation but they should choose the golden mean between insisting upon their own point of view and complete capitulation to youth.

Indeed, we may go much further and say that just as, despite the love of man and woman, there has always been a war of sex against sex, so despite the love of parents and children, there is also eternal war between the old and young. The small boy loves, reveres, and obeys his father but often oscillates to the opposite state of fear and even hate under the law of the so-called ambivalence of feeling. Each age tends to assert itself and to resent the undue influence of another age. Youth pushes on and up and seeks to make itself effective and to escape or resist control by elders. This is very fully brought out in the recent literature of psychoanalysis. In primitive society the boy soon transfers this attitude toward his parents to the chief of the tribe, and then perhaps to a supreme being, for all gods are made in the father image. Indeed, we are now told that the primal, generic sin in its extreme form is patricide, and one of the deepest fears is directed against authority. The pre-Abrahamic sheik was his own priest and king and that of his tribe. There was no law save his will. Enlarged, perfected, and projected into the sky, the patronymic sire became a deity. Part of the ancient reverence for fathers accumulated from generation to generation was thus transcendentalized into deities and part of it developed in the mundane sphere as reverence for rulers, heroes, the great dead, or perhaps into the worship of ancestors. But one very essential part of it survives in adult life in the attitude toward authority, every instrument and bearer of which is thus generically a father-surrogate. Thus older people feel toward their deities much as younger children do toward earthly parents and the greater men in their environment. There is always a measure of love and dread merging into each other. Ancient tribes that Robertson Smith and Frazer describe, after selecting and feeding fat their rulers for a time, ascribing to them divine prerogatives, giving them extraordinary freedom in certain respects while restricting them by severe taboos and in other ways, finally slew them ritually as sacrifices offered with piacular rites. All this illustrates the same dual trend of affectivity within and so does the fate of every deity who is slain, perhaps with every indignity and torture, and afterwards resurrected, transfigured, and glorified.

All government in a sense, too, springs from paternalism, and so does all human power, dignity, and prerogatives, so that the French revolutionist and even Nihilist, who is chronically and constitutionally against all the powers that be and who feels that every command or prohibition is a challenge to defy or violate it, only illustrates the extreme of revolt now sometimes designated as kurophobia.

Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct of rebellion. In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism or anti-suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all sons against all sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality and gives its élan to the passion for boundless freedom, which may even degenerate into forms of affectation and a passion for over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature herself, fathers and what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s chief opposition in the world’s history. The very words “obey” and “conform” hardly exist in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too, always denies and defies and all through the history of religions has been the typical rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and democracies. He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties and on this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree.

In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief monopolized the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are told that they were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny arose. Freudians hold that the son’s rancor against the father is rooted in this inhibition of the mating instinct. This doubtless did contribute very much to intensify it as the boy grew to man’s estate but it is going too far to say that in the very intricate grammar of revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago showed the grammar of assent to be, other factors did not come in and that there no other social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early childhood--in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under and over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the meridian of life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the countless devices of those who are aging to maintain their power and influence, which perhaps never in history had such an efficient bulwark as when they became secure in the right of testamentary bequest of their property as they wished--and is only mitigated in the case of the very old because they are few and feeble and have already in many ways been superseded and relegated to inefficiency.

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. The gods, whose favorite I lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in the latter part of Faust and at the end of Wilhelm Meister was abundantly shown.

We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566), a wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate life, found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and so radically changed not only his mode of life but his residence and devoted himself, after this crisis, with the “most incessant attention” to the securing of perfect health, studying every item of diet and regimen for its effects upon him. At eighty-three, after more than forty years of perfect health and undisturbed tranquillity, he wrote his La Vita Sobria, an essay that was later followed by three others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one, the last at ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history and one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people lead is utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later years of life as compared with the earlier ones. His message to the world has been a classic. He hoped that he had made the moderate life so attractive that the attitude of the world toward old age and death would be changed.

In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived life in the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to be content with a little and experience all the joys that come from self-control. When the passions are subdued, man can give himself up wholly to reason. His physicians told him that he must partake of no food save that prescribed for invalids but he found that he must carefully study each article of diet and decide for himself because no general prescriptions avail. By dint of long observations upon himself he started with the belief that “whatever tastes good will nourish and strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health.” He guarded particularly against great heat, cold, and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep, would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive exposure to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely injured by a carriage accident so that all his friends expected his death and the physicians suggested either bleeding or purging as forlorn hopes. He refused both and trusted to the recuperative effects of his well regulated life. He recovered completely as he, indeed, fully expected to do, although it was thought by his friends to be miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of physicians and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat and soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces of wine, as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under this increased diet he grew seriously ill (at seventy-eight). But on returning to his old dietary he recovered.

Hence, he concludes that “a man cannot be a perfect physician of anyone except of himself alone” and that by dint of experimenting he may “acquire a perfect knowledge of his own condition and of his most hidden qualities and find out what food and what drink and what quantities of each would agree with his stomach.” “Various experiments are absolutely necessary, for there is not so great a variety of features as there is diversity of temperaments and stomachs among men.” He found he could not drink wine over a year old, and that pepper injured but cinnamon helped him, something which no physician could have anticipated. He shows the fallacy of the notion that such a life leaves nothing to fall back upon in time of sickness by saying that such sickness would thus be avoided and that his dietary is sufficient so that in sickness, when all tend to eat less, he has still a sufficient margin, although probably the quantity or quality of food that suits him, he admits, might not suit others. The objection that many who lead irregular lives live to be old he refutes by saying that some have exceptional vitality but that all can prolong life by his method. He tells us that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is never perturbed in soul, is occupied during the entire day, changes his residence in warm weather to the country which he thinks important, enjoys the society of able, cultivated, and active-minded men, and all his senses have remained perfect.

He tells us that he improved upon Sophocles, who wrote a tragedy at seventy-three, for he has written a comedy; of his seven grandchildren, all offspring of one pair; how he enjoys singing (probably religious incantations), and how much his voice has improved; that he would not be willing to exchange “either my life or my great age for that of any young man,” etc. He praises his heart, memory, senses, brain, and is certain that he will die, when the time comes, without pain or illness and hopes to enjoy the other world beyond.

In his later discourses he tells us that although naturally of a very choleric disposition he entirely subdued it. He corrects the notion that the old must eat much to keep their bodies warm; says as old age is a disease we must eat less, as we do when ill; refutes the maxim “a short life and a merry one” and the fallacy that one cannot much prolong or shorten life by regimen; tells us exactly what foods he prefers--soup, eggs, mutton, fowl, fish, etc. At ninety-one he says, “The more my years multiply, the more my strength also increases,” and he preaches an earthly paradise after the age of eighty; while at ninety-five he writes that all his faculties “are in a condition as perfect as ever they were; my mind is more than ever keen and clear, my judgment sound, my memory tenacious, my heart full of life,” and his voice so strong that he has to sing aloud his morning and evening prayers. He enjoys two lives at the same time, one earthly and the other heavenly by anticipation.

As Cornaro advanced in years he grew very proud of his age, and his four discourses give us the impression that regimen and hygiene were his true religion, although he was very pious according to the standards of his age. His diet, the houses he built to live in for each season, his charities, the public works he instituted, and even the friends he cultivated, like everything else he said and did, were determined largely by what he thought were their effects upon his physical and mental health. No young man or young woman was ever prouder of his youth than he of his age. He gloried in it as manhood and womanhood do in their prime, and no evangelist was more intent on convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment than he was in exhorting men to change their mode of life to make it more sane, temperate, and abstemious--and that in a day and land when gluttony and riotous living were rife. For him a feast, rich repast, or a formal dinner was suicidal; and so were late hours, irregularities, excitement, and every form and degree of excess. So superior is senescence to all the other stages of life that he believed men should be dominated from the first by the desire to attain it as the supreme mundane felicity, because no one can be truly happy but the old. His mission was evidently to be the apostle of senescence.

True, he repeats himself, is often very platitudinous, no doubt, like most old men, greatly overestimates his powers, and if a poor and ignorant man would have been, very likely, a tedious old dotard. But as it is, his treatment of the problem of life is of great and lasting significance.

Lord Bacon was evidently influenced by Cornaro, as he in turn was by the abstemious practices of monks and ascetics. Among the very practical suggestions of his paper we strike many quotations that have become familiar to all--Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark, and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other; since life is short and art is long, our chiefest aim should be to perfect the arts, and the greatest of them all is that of long life. Diet receives chief consideration. Bacon seems almost to believe that the ancients acquired a mode of putting off old age to a degree that has now become a lost art “through man’s negligence.” He stresses the power of the “spirits” and its waxing green again as the most ready and compendious way to long life but tells us that it may be in excess or in defect as, indeed, may every other activity; while the middle or moderate way is always to be sought. He discourses on the necessity of sufficient but not too much exercise, which must never be taken if the stomach is either too full or too empty. “Many dishes have caused many diseases,” and many medicines have caused few cures. “Emaciating diseases, afterwards well cured, have advanced many in the way of long life for they yield new juice, the old being consumed, and to recover from a sickness is to renew youth. Therefore, it were good to make some artificial diseases, which is done by strict and emaciating diets.”

Sleep is an aid to nourishment and it is especially important that in sleeping the body always be warm. Sleep is nothing but the reception and retirement of the living spirit into itself. We must also be cheerful in relation to both sleep and eating and he has many admonitions upon the advantages of pure air, the right affection, hope not too often frustrated, and especially a sense of progress, for most who live long have felt themselves advancing. Old men should dwell upon their childhood and youth, for this means rejuvenation. Hence association of the old with others whom they knew when young is most helpful. Habits, customs, and even diet, must be changed, but not too often or too much. One must constantly observe and study the effect upon himself of all the items of regimen. Grief, depression, excessive fear, lack of patience, are passions that feed upon and age the body. Each must acquire a wisdom “beyond the rules of physic; a man’s own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health, and with regard to many things he must wisely and rightly decide whether or not they are good or bad for him, and that independently of all precepts and advice.”

Thus in his quaint style, and for reasons most of which science of to-day would utterly discard, he had the sagacity to reach many of the conclusions that are quite abreast of and in conformity with the most practical results of modern hygiene.

Addison, avowedly more or less inspired by Cornaro, after condemning the prevailing gluttony says, “For my part, when I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dyspepsias, fevers and lethargies, and other distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes.” He delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish--herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of the third. Man alone falls upon everything that comes in his way. “Not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or mushroom escapes him.” Hence he advises that we make our whole repast out of one dish and that we avoid all artificial provocatives, which create false appetites. He advises, too, that since this rule is so hard, “every man should have his days of abstinence according as his constitution will permit. These are great reliefs to nature as they qualify her for struggling with hunger and thirst and give her an opportunity of extricating herself from her oppressions. Besides that, abstinence will oftentimes kill a sickness in embryo and destroy the first seeds of an indisposition.” He then quotes the temperateness of Socrates, which enabled him to survive the great plague. He finds that many ancient sages and later philosophers developed a regimen so unique that “one would think the life of a philosopher and the life of a man were of two different dates.”

Robert Burton thinks old age inherently melancholy, for “being cold and dry and of the same quality as melancholy it must needs come in.” It is full of ache, sorrow, grief, and most other faults, and these traits are most developed in old women and best illustrated by witches. The children of old men are rarely of good temperament and are especially liable to depression. He expatiates most fully upon the tragedy of old men and young wives, and gives many long incidents of jealousy and unfaithfulness of women who, although carefully guarded, have made old husbands cuckold. This is often worse in dotards, who become effeminate, cannot endure absence from their wives, etc. On this theme he elaborates for many pages, with scores of incidents from literature and history.

Jonathan Swift describes the Struldbruggs or immortals whom he met in a far country. They were distinguished by being born with a red circle over the left eye, which changed in color and grew in size with age. These beings, he thought, must be a great blessing, and he described to those who had first told him of them what he would do were it his great good fortune to be born a Struldbrugg. First of all, he would amass wealth so that in two hundred years he would be the richest man in the realm. Next he would apply himself to learning, which in the course of time would make him wisest of all men. Then he would note all events and become a living treasury of knowledge and the oracle of the nation. He would be able to warn rising generations against all impending evils and thus prevent degeneration.

Having heard his ideals, he was told that in fact the state of these immortals was very different; indeed, so pitiful was it that their example mitigated the universal desire to live, so that death was no longer the greatest evil but, on the contrary, undue prolongation of life was a far greater one. The Struldbruggs acted like mortals till about thirty, then grew melancholy until four-score, when they had “not only the follies and infirmities of other old men but had many more which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying.” “They were not only opinionative, peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” “Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passion, but the objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure, and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which they themselves can never hope to arrive.” “They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age and even that is very imperfect, and for the truth or particulars of any fact it is safer to depend on the common traditions than upon their best recollections.” “The less miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their memories; they meet with more pity and assistance because they lack many bad qualities which abound in others.” If they marry one of their own kind, the marriage is dissolved as soon as the younger comes to be four-score, for they “should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.”

“As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates, only a small pittance being reserved for their support, and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period they are held incapable of any employment of trust or privilege, cannot purchase land or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause either civil or criminal.” “At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, they have at that age no distinction of taste but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.” In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relatives. “For the same reason they can never amuse themselves with reading because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end. The language of the country, too, is slowly undergoing a change so that the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of another but live like foreigners in their own country.” They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born it is reckoned ominous and the birth is recorded very particularly, but in general the record is lost after a thousand years. “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women were more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their number of years.”

Thus from what the author saw and heard, his keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated and he realized that there was no form of death to which he would not run with pleasure in order to escape such a life. He concludes that it is fortunate that his desire of taking specimens of these people to his own country was forbidden by law, and reflects that their maintenance might prove a grievous public charge, for since “avarice is the necessary consequent of old age, these immortals would, in time, become proprietors of the whole nation and engross the civil power, which a want of abilities to manage must end in the ruin of the public.”