59 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



duration of life is ten years less than among the equally intemperate 

 but less misgoverned natives of Northern Germany, and almost twenty 

 years less than in the equally despotic but less poison-cursed territo- 

 ries of the Shah. 



Historically, too, the lowest ebb of human happiness coincides with 

 that of human longevity. The ancient Greeks outlived us by about 

 thirty years, but even our northern Russians would outlive the nations 

 of the Christian middle ages, when common sense was a capital crime, 

 the suppression of all natural instincts the chief aim of education, and 

 the invention of new instruments of torture the only flourishing branch 

 of industry. The Western pessimists dislike to confess the main object 

 of their religion ; but their first exemplar, Buddha Nepaulensis, did not 

 hesitate to define it as the mortification of all earthly desires in other 

 words, the shortening of life by all j)ossible means, excepting the resort 

 to the summary and, therefore, more desirable methods of direct suicide. 



The depreciation of Nature, which formed the constant theme of the 

 orthodox preachers, may have had something to do with the unparal- 

 leled destructiveness of mediceval epidemics ; if life was a curse and 

 death the highest gain, the converts of such dogmas must have yielded 

 to Siva with Hindoo-like apathy, while, on the other hand, it is a 

 well-established fact that the mere determination to live has often 

 turned the scales in the crisis of an apparently hopeless disease. Dur- 

 ing the Grecian Revolution of 1821, Edward Trelawney survived a load 

 of buckshot because he "felt that he had no right to die," and mothers 

 with a houseful of sick children have frequently resisted the virus of 

 a contagious fever. Mahmed Kasim, the first Arabian conqueror of 

 Hindostan, was infected with the pest by the messenger of a rajah 

 who had adoj>ted that method of freeing his country from the invad- 

 ers, and, in spite of all remedies, a number of Mahmed's companions 

 died before the end of the week. But Mahmed himself " conquered 

 the disease as he had conquered the rajahs " recovered by sheer will- 

 force, and continued the campaign on the seventh day after the arrival 

 of the plague-bearer. 



In the century of Trajan, the Thessalian mountaineers were the 

 macrobiotes, the long-livers, par excellence, of the Roman Empire ; 

 the natives of Asia Minor, with her over-populated islands and luxu- 

 rious cities, the most short-lived. Time has since wrought strange 

 changes in the land of the Ephesians ; the wealthy cities have disap- 

 peared, and, with the single exception of her North-Persian neighbors, 

 the Levanters are now the longest-lived race on earth. Next come 

 the Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Hindoos, and southern Russians ; next to 

 these, and long before any West Europeans, the present inhabitants 

 of the United States, for the advantages of a golden age like ours 

 more than counteract such things as pork-fritters and strawberry-short- 

 cakes. Among the separate States, North Carolina and Vermont hold 

 the highest rank ; Louisiana and New Jersey the lowest, topographi- 



