LONGEVITY. 591 



cally as well as biologically. As a rule, highlanders outlive their low- 

 land neighbors, country people the city folks, and among the cities of 

 the Caucasian nations sea-port towns without swamps are the most 

 salubrious. New York is the healthiest large city in America ; St. 

 Petersburg, in spite of her high latitude, the unhealthiest of all cities 

 whatever, taking the longevity of the natives as a criterion, for the 

 inclusion of foreign residents would give the highest death-rate to 

 Singapore or Vera Cruz. The Neva swamps breed fever and rheuma- 

 tism, diphtheria and consumption, turn about, and in co-operation with 

 the marasmus of bureaucracy and political espionage. But what 

 makes Munich such a peculiarly unhealthy place ? It must be lager- 

 beer, or else the tedium of Bavarian orthodoxy and Wagner's operas 

 the mania of the past combined with the " music of the future " for 

 under the same latitude merry Paris reconciles fast-living with long- 

 living enough to yield to no first-class city except New York. The 

 burghers of Vienna shorten their lives with greasy made-dishes, and 

 the Berliners with fell schnapps and a still fiercer struggle for exist- 

 ence twelve hundred thousand eupeptic bipeds, surrounded by sand- 

 hills, and living on their wits and on each other. 



Lonc|on holds about the medium between New York and St. Peters- 

 burg, but should not be mentioned in the same class with other towns, 

 since her populace has expanded into a nation, distributed over fifteen 

 or sixteen towns and half a hundred villages. The business part of 

 the great brick wilderness, divested of its oases and outlying garden 

 regions, would probably prove to be the richest harvest-field of Death, 

 for coal-smoke and red-hot competition are unfavorable to longevity, 

 and the mens cequa in arduis has ceased to be an Anglo-Saxon charac- 

 teristic. 



The cities of Italy, Spain, and Portugal have become parasites 

 upon the starving country population ; strongholds of pampered priests 

 and titled sinecurists ; but, with all his freedom from worldly cares, 

 the gordo sanducho, the clerical glutton, is outlived by the rustic 

 pariah, as a proof that the favor of Nature is better than the favor of 



princes : 



" How small the part that laws can cause or cure, 

 Of all the ills that human hearts endure ! " 



and human bodies, too ; the tax-collector, with his thumb-screws, 

 calls around once a year, but the gout every week, and dyspepsia once 

 or twice a day. Turks and Italians inhabit the same latitude, and 

 nearly the same kind of mountains and semitropical plains, and the 

 remarkable physical inferiority of the Trinitarians must be ascribed to 

 their stimulating diet and greater sensuality, for somehow or other 

 the rustic Mussulman is a truer monogamist than his Western neighbor. 

 In the time of Strabo the Island of Cos was noted for the general 

 health of its inhabitants and their longevity, which some Grecian phy- 

 sicians attributed to the excellence of the drinking-water, and others 



