- ment, in which we cannot see the intervention of
clearly accidental and abnormal disturbing agents. Death appears to be the termination of a breaking-up proceeding by insensible degrees in consequence of the progressive accumulation of very small inappreciable perturbations. This slow breaking up is adequately expressed by the term—growing old, or senescence. The alterations by which it is betrayed in the cell are especially atrophic, but they are also accompanied, however, by different forms of degeneration. An extremely important question arises on this subject, and that is whether the phenomena of senility have their cause in the cell itself, if they are inevitably found in its organization, and therefore if old age and death are natural and necessary phenomena. Or, on the other hand, should we consider them as due to a progressive alteration of the medium, the character of which would be accidental although frequent or habitual? This, in a word, is the problem which has so often engaged the attention of philosophical biologists. Are old age and death natural and inevitable phenomena?
The recent experiments of Loeb and Calkins, and all similar observations, tend to attribute to the phenomenon of growing old the character of a remediable accident. But the remedy has not been found, and the animal finally succumbs to these slow transformations of its anatomical elements. We then say that it dies of old age.
Metchnikoff's Theory of Senescence. Objections.—Metchnikoff has proposed a theory of the mechanism of this general senescence. The elements of the conjunctive tissue, phagocytes, macrophages, which exist everywhere around the specialized and higher
