limit of its running, and was completely exhausted.
Steinach has not yet tried whether a third rejuvenation is possible.
That remains to be seen. He lives in Vienna, and everything there has
come to a stop. He has no assistants, no funds, with which to conduct
further experiments. "May happier lands or cities carry the work on," he
writes at the end.
It seems as though some rich American ought to stake the old boy.
* * * *
Steinach has naturally found it more difficult to give new youth to
females. But here, too, he has in a measure succeeded. X-ray treatment
and ovarian transplantation are the methods employed.
As to human experiments, there is a colleague of Steinach's named
Lichtenstern, who has operated on numerous men and women with apparent
success. There has not been time yet to measure how long their new lease
of life is to be; but they have regained the joy of life they had
lost--strength and powers of work. Still, all this needs confirming.
In a rat it is the sexual impulses that are directly reanimated. He
again knows the fevers of courtship, the conflicts of marriage; and
whether he is glad to repeat these commotions depends on the rat. In
man, however, the sexual impulses are more or less sublimated, so that
the new energy may appear in any of the other forms of psychic activity.
Whatever such faculties he has in him once more grow strong.
* * * *
How wonderful it would be if we could at least prolong certain
lives--great writers like H. G. Wells and Conrad, great artists, great
doctors. But in practice, the men who would get hold of this would be
John D. Rockefeller and W. J. Bryan. The rich uncle would walk in and
tell his hopeless heirs he had been to see Steinach. Senators would live
forever. The world would grow harder for youth.
Even were we able to control all this, and reserve the boon for the
best, would it work? Say we did choose the right men--is it not too
intimate a suggestion that we should set a man of science upon them,
prepared with a little knife to slice one of their genital ducts? Men
have fought all these years for the right to live. Have they no right to
die? Must an old man who is needed by the public be condemned to live
on, his aged cells stirred and restirred while we glean his brains bare?
Some Socrates of the future may yet envy that other his hemlock.
* * * *
This, we say it regretfully, is the end of Mr. Day's article. It is
a
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