Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/353

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without blemish, without exhaustion, and without any sign of old age. Plenty of food and simple drugs have successfully resisted senility and the train of atrophic degenerations which it involves.

Causes of Senescence.—As for the causes of senescence which have been remedied with such success, they are not exactly known. Calkins thinks that senescence results from the progressive losses to the organism of some substance essential to life. Conjugation or intensive alimentation would act by building up again this necessary compound. G. Loisel believes on the contrary that it is a matter of the progressive accumulation of toxic products due to a kind of alimentary auto-intoxication.