contagion has enabled us to erect against them impregnable barriers. Cholera, yellow fever, the plague knock in vain at our doors. Diphtheria, dreaded by every mother, has partially lost its deadly character. Puerperal fever and blindness of the new-born child are tending to disappear. Legend tells us that Buddha in his youth, frightened at the sight of a sick man, expressed in his father's presence the wish to be always in perfect health and sheltered from disease. The King answered: "My son! you are asking the impossible." But it is towards the realization of this impossibility that we are on our way. Science is repelling the attacks of disease.
§ 2. Old Age.
Old age is another sorrow of humanity. The stage of existence in which the strength grows less and never grows greater, and in which a thousand infirmities appear, is not, however, a stage universal in animals. Most of them die without our perceiving in them any apparent signs of senile weakness. On the other hand, some vegetables exhibit these signs. Some trees are old; but it is in birds and mammals that this decay, with the train of evils which accompanies it, becomes a very marked phase of existence. In man to debility is added a bodily shrinkage, grey hairs, withered skin, and the wearing out and loss of teeth. The exhausted and atrophied organism offers a favourable field to all intercurrent diseases and to every cause of destruction. It is this discrepitude which makes old age so hateful. All desire to be old, said Cicero; and when they are old, they say that old age has come quicker than they expected.
