THE CHANCES OF DEATH 97 



before birth as well as after and may be conceived as 

 beating down young lives with the bones of their ances- 

 tors. The second marksman who aims at childhood has 

 an extremely concentrated fire, which may be typified 

 by the machine gun. Only because of the concentration 

 of this fire are we able to pass through it without appal- 

 ling loss. The third marksman Death, who shoots at 

 youth has not a very deadly or accurate weapon, perhaps 

 a bow and arrow. The fire of the fourth marksman is 

 slow, scattered and not very destructive, such as might 

 result from, an old fashioned blunderbuss. The last Death 

 plies a rifle. None escapes his shots. He aims at old age 

 but sometimes hits youth. His unremitting activity 

 makes his toll large. 



We may let Pearson sum the whole matter up in his 

 own words : ' i Our investigations on the mortality statis- 

 tics have thus led us to some very definite conclusions 

 with regard to the chances of death, Instead of seven 

 we have five ages of man, corresponding to the periods 

 of infancy, of childhood, of youth, of maturity or middle 

 age, and of senility or old age. In the case of each of 

 these periods we see a perfectly regular chance distri- 

 bution, centering at a given age, and tailing off on either 

 side according to a perfectly clear mathematical law. . . 



"Artistically, we no longer think of Death as striking 

 chaotically; we regard his aim as perfectly regular in 

 the mass, if unpredictable in the individual instance. It 

 is no longer the Dance of Death which pictures for us 

 Death carrying off indiscriminately the old and young, 

 the rich and the poor, the toiler and the idler, the babe 

 and its grandsire. We see something quite different, 

 the cohort of a thousand tiny mites starting across the 

 Bridge of Life, and growing in stature as they advance, 



7 



