THE DURATION OF HUMAN LIFE. ioi 



being a hundred and four years old, attended the marriage of his great- 

 granddaughters in 1877, sang, and opened the ball. M. Kennoux, 

 Mayor of Plermeux-Gontier for fifty-three years, died in the same year 

 at a hundred years and eight months. Francois Pelpel, a distiller of 

 Paris, announced in the newspapers in 1878 that he had reached his 

 one hundredth year, and was enjoying good health. Louis Etienne 

 Mirvault, a former diplomat, who had served in the American war with 

 Lafayette and Rochambeau, died at Ransay in the same year, aged a 

 hundred and two years and six months. The celebrated physicist 

 Becquerel was more than a hundred years old when he died. 



Mr. Thompson, in his " Curiosities of Longevity," has related nu- 

 merous cases of centenarianism in England. One of the most remark- 

 able is that of a peasant who died near the middle of the seventeenth 

 century at the hyperbolical age of one hundred and seventy-two years, 

 and is said to have received the honor of being buried at Westminster. 

 Another is that of Henry Jenkins, who is said to have lived to one 

 hundred and seventy-five. Lord Bacon, of Verulam, in his book " De 

 Vita et Morte," speaks of the deaths of contemporaries at the ages of 

 one hundred and fifty and even of one hundred and sixty years, ages 

 that were proved, he said, by judicial documents quite worthy of faith. 

 The family of Thomas Parr, who died in his hundred and fifty-second 

 year, incontestably enjoyed the privilege of a very great length of life. 

 Parr left three grandsons, who died, one at one hundred and twenty-four, 

 the second at one hundred and twenty-five, the third at one hundred and 

 twenty-six years. William Parr died at Birmingham in 1770, one hun- 

 dred and twenty years old, after having had forty-four children, grand- 

 children, and great-grandchildren die. John Tice died in 1770, after 

 a troubled life of one hundred and twenty-six years. Mr. Thompson 

 cites also, as entirely worthy of faith, the death of one Gordon at 

 Edinburgh in 1775, at the age of one hundred and thirty-one years. 

 According to Dr. Isidore Bourdon, Greenwich Hospital had in 1806 

 one hundred and twenty centenarians, thirteen of whom were bache- 

 lors. A man applied at a life-insurance office in London, in 1875, for 

 insm*ance, who said, in answer to questions, that on his father's side 

 his grandfather had died at one hundred and ten and his grandmother 

 at ninety-five, and the same ancestors on the mother's side at one hun- 

 dred and at ninety-nine years ; his mother, still living, was one hundred 

 and five, and his father had died at one hundred and eight. A man who 

 presented himself at the police-office of Doncaster in 1872, said that he 

 was one hundred and eight years old, and had had twenty-two children, 

 and that his wife had died in 1870 at ninety-nine. The Rev. Mr. 

 "Bradon, of Southampton, was congratulated by the Queen on the 

 occasion of his hundredth birthday in 1877. The Rev. James Hing- 

 ham died at Unst in February, 1879, aged one hundred and three. 

 He had learned Hebrew and German after he was ninety ; his father 

 died at one hundred and his grandfather at one hundred and five. It 



