signs of the dawn presaging a sunburst of posthumous fame? Spinoza and Schiller died at the threshold of their goal; Pascal, Harvey, Macaulay, Buckle, and Bichat left their inimitable works half-finished; Raphael, Mozart, and Byron died at the verge of a summit which perhaps no other foot shall ever approach. Who knows how often, since the dawn of modern science, the chill of death has palsied a hand that had all but lifted the veil of the Isis temple? Or in how many thousand lives time alone would have solved all discords into harmonies? An increase of longevity would, indeed, solve the most vexing riddles of existence; it would furnish the secular indorsement of Mr. Mallock's conclusion. It would give the vicissitudes of fortune a chance to assert their equalizing tendencies; it would supply a missing link in the arguments of that natural religion that trusts the equipoise of justice in the apparent caprices of human fate. The price of longevity would redeem the mortgage of our earthly paradise. And that price could be paid even by the disciples of Epicurus. The belief in the possibility of a merry, though wasted, life has its correlative in the idea that a lengthened life must necessarily be a dreary one. Health can dispense with the alliance of asceticism. The renunciation of vicious pleasures means only the renunciation of thousands of those ills which the children of earth owe exclusively to their apostasy from nature; and that the indulgence in natural enjoyments is compatible with perfect health is proved by the longevity records of the nations that celebrated life as a festival. The biologist Bichat, whose intuitions so marvelously anticipated the conclusions of a later science, held that the normal longevity of our race should be an average of ninety-six years, basing his inference on the fact that the life-term of all known mammals exceeds at least six times the period of their growth. A dog, growing for three years, may live to eighteen or twenty. A horse, growing for four or five, attains, and often exceeds, an age of thirty years. A camel, growing twice as slowly, may live to forty years and upward. An elephant, even in captivity, does not attain its full growth before its fifteenth year, and in India often outlives two masters. Some of the larger quadrumana likewise grow very slowly; several varieties of baboons, for instance, do not acquire the characteristics of maturity before the beginning of their teens; and the naturalist Brehm mentions a male chacma, who, after becoming the patriarch of his tribe, raided the durra-fields of the Zulu villages for nearly thirty years before he met his Waterloo in a fight with the outraged natives. The males of our own species grow for at least sixteen years, but less than onethird reach even the threefold multiple of that age, and hardly one in three hundred the normal sixfold. Attention has also to be called to the circumstance that, whether the years of Genesis may have been solar years, moons, or seasons, the genealogy of the patriarchs records a steady decrease of longevity, since the author of that record can hardly be supposed to have used, within the same chapter, two or three different units of computation. Besides, there is an a priori probability that the average duration of our life-term must have been shortened by those three billion tons of virulent stimulants, which, according to Dr. Schrodt's estimate, have convulsed the viscera of mankind since the invention of alcoholic beverages, not to mention narcotic drinks, tobacco, made dishes, premature marriages, in-door life, sedentary occupations, high-pressure schools, sleepless nights, and all the fracas, fret, and factory-smoke of modern city life. There is no doubt that the average of longevity has slightly increased since science has begun to dispel the monstrous hygienic superstitions of the Middle Ages, but it is equally certain that those superstitions enormously decreased the average lifeterm of earlier generations. Mental activity, under the stimulus of a fierce competition, is not specially conducive to length of life; yet a surprising number of Grecian statesmen, poets, and philosophers were octogenarians. The sun of the South did not prevent the passionate, though dietetically temperate, Saracens of Bagdad and Cordova from reaching an age which their Trinitarian contemporaries often ascribed to the machinations of witchcraft. Yet neither the Greeks nor the Moriscoes were distinguished for the practice of the ascetic virtues. They loved life for its own sake, and saw nothing meritorious in gratuitous self-denial. Physical exercise, out-door sports, abstinence from toxic stim ulants and premature incontinence, frugality, in the original sense that implied a predilection for a mainly vegetable diet, and the love of mirth and harmless recreations, generally suffice to keep disease at bay, though there is also a deep significance in Goethe's remark, that perfect health of mind and body depends upon the regular, though not necessarily exclusive, pursuit of some practical occupation. Brain-workers, he thought, should follow some mechanical by-trade, and counteract the one-sided tendencies of their study by mechanical labor, say, in an amateur carpenter shop, or a private smithy, à la E. J. Burritt; or, better yet, on a little farm, with a bit of live stock and a thriving orchard. Disappointment, oft repeated, undermines health as effectually as protracted physical pain, and for the worry of the vexations incident to the complex and precarious pursuits of modern civilization, there is, indeed, no better specific than the peace of a rustic garden home. Xenophon's hunting-lodge, Felix Sylla's cabbage garden, Erasmus's greenhouse, the patriarch of Ferney's home-made Eden, with its pear-tree nurseries and refugee settlement, and even the woodlands and wood-piles of Hawarden, may have enabled their proprietors to outlive the rancor of their enemies, and in all secular pursuits the art of survival is a chief secret of success. Other-worldliness may renounce those pursuits, and in a narrower sphere of physical enjoyment the vital organism may fulfill its functions in a day as completely as in any multiple of days, but in the world of progress and social ideals only the hope of long life, or its equivalent in fame, gives existence the value of its highest purpose. FELIX L. OSWALD. INDEX TO THE FIFTH VOLUME OF THE FORUM. Agitation. The Hysteria of Sectional, | Church Rule in Utah. 673. 134. Barbarous Funeral Customs. Our, 666. Battle of the Books. The New, 564. Blackie. John Stuart, Scotland To- Blaine Carry New York? Could Mr., City Government. Obstacles to Good, Civil Government and the Papacy. 121. Cure. 192. The Stuff That Dreams Control of Railways. National, 299. Creed, Craft, and Cure. 192. Cullom. Shelby M., Appropriations Customs. Our Barbarous Funeral, 666. Dawn of Electricity. The, 178. Dutton. C. E., Church and State in Economics. Poverty, Sympathy, and, Edmunds. George F., The Political Electricity. The Dawn of, 178. The, The Ratio of English and American Manners. 521. Faith Cure Delusion. The, 691. The Element of Life in, Temporal Foord. John, Could Mr. Blaine Carry Power and the Papacy. |