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occurs at conjugation; this is exactly paralleled by the ability of mice or rats to live well for a certain time on certain single proteins, but to end by a sudden decline and death long before the usual period. But, by careful regulation, the strain of protozoa can be prevented from getting unbalanced; and in this state the cells appear to have an unlimited power of reproduction, the strain of living matter to have an unlimited potential existence. The dying-out of a strain of protozoa is due to the upsetting of a balance.

Progressive change, leading inevitably to old age by alteration of this inner balance, is seen over and over again in animals. Among the simpler multicellular forms it has been studied most thoroughly in the Planarian flatworms, by Professor Child, of Chicago. Planarians are common inhabitants of ponds and streams, curious thin and leaf-like organisms which glide slowly along the stones and water-weeds, feeding for the most part on dead animal matter, faintly sensitive to light, with a very simple and lowly type of nervous system and general organization. Many of these can reproduce, like protozoa, by fission, so that here, too, so long as fission continues, the substance is potentially immortal, and it is but the form that dies. But Child has shown that even the form, the single individual, need not age and die. If one of these animals is kept without food, it does not simply lose weight, lose power and health, and rapidly die, like a starving dog or man, but is able, owing to its very simplicity of organization, to live upon itself. A starved flatworm gets smaller and smaller, but remains perfectly healthy and active until it becomes extremely minute, dying only when it has gone back to about the size at which it hatched from the egg. If fed at any time while still active, it will once more start normal growth. VOL. S10-NO. 4024

Some twenty years ago it had been noticed that such starved and miniature worms reassume the shape and proportions of really young individuals. More recently, Child has shown that they resemble them, too, in their behavior and the great activity of their chemical processes. In a word, they are not only small, they not only look young, but, in the only sense in which we can attach a real meaning to the word, they are young once again. Can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?' asked Nicodemus; here is a fact almost as startling.

Following this up, Child divided a batch of worms into two lots. One he kept in normal conditions, with abundant food. For the other he fixed in his mind definite limits of size. When they reached the upper limit, he let them starve; when they fell to the lower limit, he fed them again, and so on. During the time the experiment was continued, this second lot was successfully kept within these limits. The individuals never divided, never showed signs of ageing, and by all the tests that could be thought of, were in the same general condition at the end as at the beginning. The other lot meanwhile passed through eighteen generations, a period which, if translated into human terms, would represent over five centuries.

To the question which we posed at an earlier stage, the question whether age is only a question of external time, or is determined by inner factors, by the way the animal is and has been working, we may now, I think, give a definite answer. Real age is determined internally. We measure it by the lapse of years, for convenience; but the only true old age is physiological. Many men and women of seventy are really younger, in the right and proper meaning of the word, than many men and women of sixty.

Unfortunately, however, these experiments, important as they are, do not show us directly how to prolong human life. The elixir vita was sought by alchemists throughout the Middle Ages. It does now definitely seem to have been found — but alas! only for flatworms (with an ersatz-imitation, as we saw before, for fruit flies)! In one case, it is intermittent starvation; in the other, low temperature. But neither intermittent starvation nor cold will prolong human life. We are so constructed that we cannot live upon our own tissues, nor can our temperature be altered. It may be some consolation to remember that it is just because our brain is so complex, our mental activity so intense, that we cannot submit to starvation; also that if by any chance our temperature could be reduced, all our activities and all our motions, of pleasure and delight as well as of pain and discomfort, all, in fact, that gives life its value, would be so reduced in intensity that we could scarcely recognize them.

No: we must accept the fact that our level of existence, so high above that of the simpler animals, is possible only in a delicately balanced system, and that, if we tilt the balance comparatively slightly, the only existence that counts

one of physical and mental activity - is no longer possible to us. Our chief aim must be to preserve and to extend this state of balance that we call healthy maturity.

It will be recalled that adding tethelin from the pituitary body to the diet extended the life of mice. It is probable that this was due to a change of

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the balance. The tissues of the body can be broadly divided into the cellular tissues, which are those doing active work, glands, nerves, muscles, blood, -and the supporting tissues, which make a framework for the rest of the body-bone, cartilage, and the connective tissue that binds all the others together. The supporting tissues are in a sense parasitic on the rest they are passive, the others active. In old age, the connective tissues always accumulate; there is a greater proportion of them in the old than in the young. It looks as if the processes of life gradually slow down, and, as they slow down, it is easier for supporting tissue to be formed. To use once more our simile of a river, as the current slows, the sediment it carries with it will no longer help erode and deepen the channel, but will be deposited, and the channel will begin to silt up; and yet these two opposite tendencies, of erosion and siltingup, will be due only to a difference in the rate of the current. The effect of tethelin seems undoubtedly to be to stimulate the growth of the cellular tissues; they thus get an advantage in the internal competition of the parts of the body, and so the final preponderance of the supporting tissues - which means an ever-increasing burden on the active cellular parts is postponed. It may be mentioned that two of the biological authorities on senility, Minot and Child, agree broadly with this view. Minot sees the cause of old age in differentiation, which leads to accumulation of structure, and Child in slowing of metabolism, which he believes to be behind differentiation.

BRITISH ATHLETES AND THEIR CRITICS

BY HORACE HUTCHINSON

[Mr. Hutchinson was a prominent figure in the earlier days of English golf and is well known as a writer on sports. Since his article was written, the Oxford and Cambridge track team has been defeated by Harvard and Yale, and an English tennis team has won from an American.]

From The Westminster Gazette, July 1
(OLD LIBERAL WEEKLY)

AMERICA has won the polo. America has won the golf. America has won the war. We know that America has won the war, for she has said so. As one of her own admirable humorists has written, 'I know he is a gentleman, for he told me so himself, and a man would not tell a lie about a little matter like that.' After all, it is not quite fair to say that America claims to have won the war.

No reasonable American claims it, and there are absurd people, in every country. A friend of mine lately returned from America told me that he had been, while in that country, to hear an American lecturing on the characteristics of American humor. One of the characteristics that the lecturer dwelt on was its love of exaggeration. By way of one instance, he cited the American who told his friends that the fish were so large where he went angling that they commonly used whales for bait; by way of another instance, he quoted the American saying, 'We won the war.' And an American audience received it well.

But whatever America won or did not win, it is certain that we, of Britain, are not just now winning much, and my present object in writing is to argue that the principal reason why we are not winning in such contests as the polo match, the golf, the lawn-tennis, and the cricket test-matches is a reason that

we have not great cause to be ashamed of. The reason is that we did win the war. Far be it from us to claim that alone we did it, to deny stricken and gallant France and Belgium. Italy, moreover, has a right to her own share, and Rumania and Japan. But for what we did we may take our due, and we know only too grievously the price we paid for the doing, the loss of the splendid young manhood. Who will say that the four who would, had the war not come, have been our team this year at Hurlingham, may not, one and all, be lying in the soil of France, of Mesopotamia, of Gallipoli? Such a toll of athletic youth has been exacted of us as never before, and can we expect, is it reasonable, that we should be as rich in athletic manhood as if that toll had not been taken? Surely not. It is just because we won the war, and won it at such price, that we are relatively so poor; and it is only justice to ourselves that we should recognize the glorious reason of our poverty.

America had her losses; America did her share, and a share that we should be criminally ungrateful if we failed to appreciate generously, in the war's winning, but her sacrifice is scarcely to be accounted for by the measure of ours. Let us see these things in their true light, though we are Britons and, so, with an inveterate habit of regarding

ourselves with eyes of sad pessimism. No nation can lay in the dust a generation of its manhood and be all that it was before, until time allows some, at least, of that loss to be made good. It would be folly to expect it.

We were beaten in the polo very handsomely - no two words are to be said about that: out played at all points, possibly proved wrong in our very conception of the main principles of the game. Did not the Americans win largely by their harder hitting, though largely, too, by their better shooting at goal? Of polo, however, I know nothing, except such glimmer of half-knowledge as a mere spectator may gain.

But golf I have played, and there are more than two words to be said to the pessimist who tells us, with sour joy, that America won the golf. A Scot, a St. Andrews man, Jock Hutchison, who went to America as a professional, won the Open Championship. Even the most anxious pessimist can make little profit out of the amateur championship where the native-born beat all the pick of the brightest golfing flora of the United States. And this Jock Hutchison, who takes back to his adopted home the cup that is the open champion's trophy, can be cited as an example of Great Britain's national decadence, which some embittered spirits find a strange joy in deploring? He was a marvelously lucky champion. Let this be said with no detraction whatsoever from the scarcely less marvelous quality of his play. He was a perfect wonder for getting threes, at holes where four is a satisfactory par score. I judge — I did not see him that he is a parlous good putter and an adept at stopping the ball near its pitch off the ribbed face of an iron club. But he was lucky! That holing of the Short-Hole-Out in one, in a scoring competition! A thousand rounds, and more, I suppose, I have played on that beloved old St.

Andrews course, yet never have I so much as seen that hole done in one. And to follow it with an only little less prodigious two at the ninth! And then to tie to tie only because Mr. Wethered, who equaled him, suffered the excruciating tragedy of walking on his ball! Was he not lucky? And, lucky or no, is it a win to be scored to the American at cost of the British credit? At least, this is not the light in which his fellow townsmen of St. Andrews viewed it when they took him, him and his champion cup, which had been handed him almost as he holed out his final putt, and hoisted him shoulder-high in triumph.

And this thought, too, may be likely to occur to us: would Hutchison have been champion to-day had he stayed in his native gray city by the sea, and not gone across the Atlantic? Had he, now thirty-eight years of age, not chosen America as his adopted home, he would have been of those who really have won the war. Would he have come back from the winning? Or, coming back, would he have been quite the same man after that experience? For that is a consideration which must essentially enter into our valuation of our manhood's strength. We have to make estimate, not only of lost lives but also of loss of health and force and nerve in those who have fought and yet live. It is an estimate more difficult and more subtle than that of the mere numbers, which can be arithmetically done; but its values are not less real because they are difficult to determine; they have to be taken into the great account. And as with our golfers and our polo players, so with our cricketers, our lawn-tennis players, and our athletes in every kind. I do not seek excuse. I am of an age when I have to sit and look on at the athletics, as I had also to sit and look on, very miserably, at the war. It is not on my own account that I am

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THOUGH I do not remember that life in the Ulster of my childhood was dull, looking back, I can see that the range of our amusements was very limited. Cricket was almost our only outdoor sport, and even cricket could hardly be said to flourish. When a man has followed a plough or a harrow all day, or mowed hay, or pulled flax, his desire for open-air exercise has generally been satisfied. Then, time was an important factor. It was well on to half-past seven before the country cricketer could take the field, which restricted his season to about eight weeks; and even in that period he finished most of his games in blind-man's holiday. I have known us play till the bowler could hardly discern the wicket at which he was aiming, and remember Hughey Dixon splitting his bat with a mighty drive he made at a round stone rolled up by our humorist, Dick Murray.

Dancing was a good deal practised among the humbler folk, mostly in an impromptu way, after a wedding or a harvest-home, on which occasions a barn or a hayloft would be the ballroom.

Sometimes on a fine summer evening the 'boys' and 'girls' would issue from the cottage where they had gathered to 'kailyie' and foot it in the yard or green before the house. Waltzes and lancers were then scarcely known among our country dancers, the fox-trot as yet undreamed of. The 'sets,' as the quadrilles were called, were our only dance. Nor were we too particular about music. In the deficiency of a fiddler, and fidIdlers were rare, a fluter from the local Orange or Nationalist band put mettle in our heels. Failing a flute, a melodeon did duty, and sometimes we sank as low as a Jew's harp, and even plain whistling. Dick Murray was a famous whistler on such occasions. I have known him whistle the 'sets' twice through, with no further assistance than a tin of buttermilk, though he was understood to do much better on porter.

But in farmers' houses there was little or no dancing, partly because the rooms in a middling farmer's house were too small to dance in, partly because dancing had not yet passed out of the category of frivolous amuse

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