Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the preservation of life after middle age is reached.

They also tend to keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to hardships in early youth.

Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the delicate and the aged.
=Savage Treatment of the Old.=--In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged.

The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example.

The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting, the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the old.
=The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men.=--Two things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life developed toward civilization.