Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/417

Rh of the third year he rode all about the country where the roads were good and for hours at a time. The loss in weight scarcely showed in the first two years, but after that it was sufficiently great to be satisfactory. At the age of seventy-six he feels himself to be all of twenty years younger than when he began.

There is a time about the middle of the life of women which is called the critical period and is supposed to be fraught with many dangers and grave disturbances. This period of the climacteric has been grossly exaggerated, and it is by no means necessary to look forward with dread to the time when menstruation ceases. Man reaches the period of highest development at forty-one years, and woman at thirty-nine. The following seven to ten years may be called the age or epoch of invigoration in both the sexes. The tissues have then become most stable and the nutrition of the body is at its best. It is one of the epochs of development and naturally is accompanied by certain characteristic features. In man these epochs are marked as follows: Dentition, pubescence and the climacteric of age. These are all practically developmental phases, although the last is usually accompanied by degenerative changes in one or another vital organ by which resistance in the tissues is lessened, allowing relatively slight influences finally to cause death. In woman there is generally recognized another, styled the change of life, or menopause. Modern investigations seem to demonstrate beyond a doubt that this change of life is merely a conservative process of nature to provide for a higher and more stable phase of existence, an economic lopping off of a function no longer needed, preparing the individual for different forms of activity, but is in no sense pathologic. It is not sexual or physical decrepitude, but belongs to the age of invigoration, marking the fullness of the bodily and mental powers. There are rather more decided changes in the blood-making and blood-elaborating organs in women, toward the end of life, than in men. Man's greater activity enables him to escape this contrast, because as a rule he has called more upon his motor machinery in using up injestedingested [sic] and assimilated material. The life of woman leads her to become more impressionable and to watch over her menstrual days, think of them, make allowances for the exigencies which may arise at such times, and to expect various disturbances and discomforts. If her mind becomes fixed upon some one small ailment or other, especially connected with this function, there is almost an inevitable hyperconsciousness and a continuance or an exaggerated degree of attention which is practically hysterical even in the best of women. Such disturbances as do arise about the time of the menopause are largely due to a normal failure of the organism to