LONGEVITY. 593 



of the cockpit, by the pickle-diet, the unnatural motion, and the foul- 

 weather misery ; and, from a sanitary stand-point, the sea-air itself is 

 hardly preferable to mountain and woodland air. The eozoon may 

 have been a marine product, but our Pliocene ancestor was probably a 

 forest creature. 



"For what length of time would you undertake to warrant the 

 health of a seaman ? " Yarnhagen asked a Dutch marine doctor. " That 

 depends on the length of his furlough," replied the frank Hollander, 

 and it will require centuries of reform to redeem our cities from the 

 odium of a similar reproach. In victuals and vitality towns consume 

 the hoarded stores of the country, and only the garden-suburbs of a 

 few North American cities are hygienically self-supporting. Per- 

 manent in-door work is slow suicide, and between the various shop- 

 trades and sedentary occupations the difference in this respect is only 

 one of degree. Factories stand at the bottom of the scale, and the 

 dust and vapor generating ones below zero ; the weaver's chances to 

 reach the average age of his species have to be expressed by a nega- 

 tive quantity. In France, where the tabulation of comparative statis- 

 tics is carried further than anywhere else, the healthfulness of the 

 principal town trades has been ascertained to decrease in the following 

 order : House-building, huckstering, hot-bed gardening (florists), car- 

 penter and brick-mason trades, street-paving, street-cleaning, sewer- 

 cleaning, blacksmiths, artisan-smiths (silver, copper, and tin concerns), 

 shoemaking, paper-making, glass-blowing, tailor, butcher, house- 

 painter, baker, cook, stone-masons and lapidaries, operatives of paint 

 and lead factories, weavers, steel-grinders the wide difference be- 

 tween brick and stone masons being due to the lung-infesting dust of 

 lapidary work, which, though an out-door occupation, is nearly as un- 

 healthy as steel-grinding. Lead-paint makers have to alternate their 

 work with jobs in the tin-shop, and, after all, can rarely stand it for 

 more than fifteen years ; needle-grinders generally succumb after 

 twelve or fourteen years. The human lungs seem able to eliminate 

 the impurities breathed by street and sewer cleaners, for, in London 

 as well as in Paris and Marseilles, the followers of both trades rank 

 high among the long-lived classes. Hucksters somehow manage to 

 outlive city gardeners as well as shopkeepers ; among the Hecubas of 

 the Paris market-hall, not less than two hundred and eighteen had 

 passed their threescore and tenth year. 



Preaching, and, strange to say, pettifogging, are the healthiest of 

 all the learned professions ; their lung-exercise may have something 

 to do with it, for lecturing-teachers outlive the " silent " teachers 

 (dancing-masters, etc.). Physicians die early ; Nature revenges her- 

 self upon her leagued adversaries, for druggists and barbers (in many 

 parts of Europe synonymous with village quacks) are likewise short- 

 lived ; but sextons reach a good old age : there must be a mistake 

 about the supposed danger of grave-yard effluvia. 

 vol. xxi. 38 



