their precise working. There seems no reason to suppose
that human life, properly understood and controlled, could not be a
constant succession of delightful and for the most part active bodily
and mental phases. It is sheer ignorance and bad management that keep
the majority of people in that disagreeable system of states which we
indicate by saying we are "a bit off colour" or a little "out of
training." It may seem madly Utopian now to suggest that practically
everyone in the community might be clean, beautiful, incessantly active,
"fit," and long-lived, with the marks of all the surgery they have
undergone quite healed and hidden, but not more madly Utopian than it
would have seemed to King Alfred the Great if one had said that
practically everyone in this country, down to the very swineherds,
should be able to read and write.

Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of delaying old age, and
I do not see why his method should not be applied to the diurnal need of
sleep. No vital process seems to be absolutely fated in itself; it is a
thing conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff is
right--and to a certain extent he must be right--the decay of age is due
to changing organic processes that may be checked and delayed and
modified by suitable food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phase
in the human cycle, after the phase of struggle and passion, a phase of
serene intellectual activity, old age with all its experience and none
of its infirmities. Still more are fatigue and the need for repose
dependent upon chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are unable
to maintain exertion, partly through the exhaustion of our tissues, but
far more by the loading of our blood with fatigue products--a
recuperative interlude must ensue. But there is no reason to suppose
that the usual food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable nurture
possible, that a rapidly digestible or injectable substance is not
conceivable that would vastly accelerate repair, nor that the
elimination and neutralisation of fatigue products might not also be
enormously hastened. There is no inherent impossibility in the idea not
only of various glands being induced to function in a modified manner,
but even in the insertion upon the circulation of interceptors and
artificial glandular structures. No doubt that may strike even an
adventurous surgeon as chimerical, but consider what people, even
authoritative people, were sa