dmirable fooling. We will not pay his wit the poor compliment of taking
him seriously at the last and pointing out to him that it was Heine who
said, "Nobody loves life like an old man!" There will be no need of
insistence to urge the old men, useful or useless, to submit to an
operation to renew their youth. But it is to be hoped that they will
never be asked to submit to the cutting of the genital duct. It seems to
the writer that +The Athenaeum+ must have misconstrued Dr. Steinach's
experiments in some degree, inasmuch as it is difficult to conceive of
the operation of severing a genital duct as conducive to cell-formation.
However, probably ligating is meant instead of severing. But this is not
the point really brought out by Mr. Day's clever article. The real point
is, Is it likely that if Mr. John Jones takes Dr. Brinkley's goat-gland
operation for the renewal of his youth, and thereby adds thirty years to
his life, and at the end of this thirty years of friskiness undergoes a
second transplantation of glands, thereby gaining twenty years more, and
at the end of this twenty years takes the operation a third time,
securing a further lease of gaiety for ten years, will the final years
of Mr. John Jones be years of acute psychic senility, as observed by Dr.
Steinach in his rat? To the writer it seems a +non sequitur+. The cases
are not parallel. The rejuvenated rat appears to regard his acquired
vitality as impelling toward revelry and excess. It is necessary to
emphasize the point that the pith and marrow of Dr. Brinkley's discovery
is that since it is clearly shown that rejuvenation is accomplished by
the restoration of activity to the sex-glands, therefore the
preservation of this rejuvenation MUST depend upon the CONSERVATION of
the seminal fluids, and cannot depend upon any other single factor
whatever. It has been already explained that Dr. Brinkley puts it out of
the power of the rejuvenated man to destroy the good that has come into
his life, and protects him against the danger of yielding too freely to
passionate impulse, by preventing the escape of the rejuvenating agent.
The means of nourishing the body and brain being therefore insured as to
supply, it is not reasonable to suppose that the nerve-cells of the
rejuvenated man can fail to receive their proper nourishment for many
succeeding years, and, passing by the rat as a fallacious parallel, we
cannot see any good reason why the human body and brain, eithe