¹ The issue of the Zweitschrift für Gerontologie given over to history (vol. 17, no. 1, 1983) contains other materials as well as the historical.

² The advances in historical sociology referred to above are summarised for England in the third edition of Peter, Laslett, The World We Have Lost (original edition, 1965)Google Scholar published as The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London, Methuen, 1983: in U.S.A., New York, Scribners, 1984). Information for other countries and the detailed sources for the statements about England made in the work cited can be sought in its references, and in many of the titles cited in the footnotes to the articles in this issue, the most important being Peter, Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar; Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, Edward Arnold, 1981: in the U.S.A., Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, 1982);Google Scholar and Wall, R., Robin, J. and Laslett, P. (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ See a book of mine now in preparation to be called Britain! Be Tour Age.! This will present evidence to justify the position so crudely sketched out above, and especially that in favour of the two plateaux hypothesis, of which the plateau-like character of our future age position needs most explication.

⁴ Some important progress has been made in the guide to the history of ageing in England written by Jill, Quadagno, Ageing in Early Industrial Society: Work, Family and Social Policy in 19th Century England (Academic Press, 1982).Google Scholar Critical as she is of modernisation, however, her time period is rather narrow and there are differences from the views expressed here. Attitudes of the elderly and towards the elderly in the more recent past are being studied by Dr P. Thane, of Goldsmith’s College, London. Research of this kind has gone further in the United States: see the writings of Daniel Scott Smith cited by Richard Wall below, and those of Hareven, Tamara K. (especially the volume edited by her, Transitions: the Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, New York, 1978).Google Scholar We cannot include a bibliography of the subject here, and it must be remembered that the whole process seems to have been different in the United States, if only because of the multiplex population there. For the encoded social customs which could account for different ways in which societies, sub-societies, even micro-societies might provide for the support of the elderly, see Laslett, , ‘The family as a knot of individual interests’, in Netting, R. McC. and others (eds), Households: Comparatine and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (University of California Press, 1984), especially pp. 361–364.Google Scholar There a class of noumenal normative rules is defined which seems to operate without the benefit of approval and disapproval.

⁵ This is the last of a number of such simulation systems, some of which have been concerned with the kin relations of elderly persons: see Hammel, E. A. and Wachter, K. W., ‘The chickens come home to roost’ in Kiesler, Morgan and Oppenheimer, (ed.), The Elderly and Their Future (Academic Press, 1981)Google Scholar, and Hervè, Le Bras, ‘Evolution des liens de famille au cours de l'existence: une comparaison entre la France actuelle et la France du XVIIIe siècle’ in Les âges de la vie, Actes du VIIe colloque national de démographie (Presses Universitaires de France, 1982).Google Scholar See also a forthcoming volume edited by Bongaarts, J., Family Demography: Methods and Their ApplicationGoogle Scholar, and especially the contribution of J. E. Smith, ‘The computer simulation of kin sets and kin counts’. Kinship simulation and its methodology are complex subjects, and the reader is warned against a too literal interpretation of simulation outputs. CAMSIM is at present exclusively concerned with what are called open population simulations and also depends on the assumption that the population situation is stable in the technical demographic sense. Other systems, e.g. SOCSIM used by Hammel and Wachter, are different in these and other respects.