594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Art still increases the value of human life, but not its length ; the 

 greatest modern masters of tune and color died in their prime, like the 

 greatest poets ; inspiration, in all its forms, would seem to be a flame 

 that consumes the human clay more quickly than the fire of affliction 

 if the extreme longevity of so many of the ancient masters did not 

 suggest a different explanation, namely, that the revelations of Nature 

 and the tendencies of established dogmas have ceased to harmonize, 

 and that the lovers of truth have nowadays to cross a Pontus where 

 they must prevail against a whole sea of adverse currents, or Leander- 

 like perish. 



In the course of the last sixty or seventy years the average dura- 

 tion of human life has undoubtedly increased in all civilized countrieSj 

 but it is not less certain that the gain of a few decades does not yet 

 begin to offset the loss of centuries ; we have saved ourselves from 

 the abyss of medieval unnaturalism, but we are still far from having 

 recovered the ancient height's of vitality; the after-effects of the Bud- 

 dha-poison still cramp our limbs and sadly retard our upward progress ; 

 but the tide has turned, and the main currents of the age have ceased 

 to set deathward. 



According to the demonstrations of the naturalist Camper, the 

 normal average of our life-term should be at least ninety years. His 

 arguments are both biological and historical, and would agree with 

 the scriptural records, if, as Schleiermacher suggests, the Genesis-years 

 were seasons, of about ninety days. The "years" of the patriarchs 

 were certainly not months, for men who saw their children and chil- 

 dren's children must have lived longer than thirty years The biolog- 

 ical argument that in a state of nature the life of a mammal relates 

 to the period of its growth as 6-8 to 1, would give us an average of 

 90-160 ; the southern Arab is full-grown with sixteen years, the north- 

 ern Caucasian hardly before twenty. Hundreds of ancient statesmen 

 and philosophers outlived their threescore and ten by a full decade, 

 though we need not doubt that then, as now, metaphysics and politics 

 were not specially conducive to longevity, nor that even by that time 

 vices had shortened the natural average by several decades. 



But there is another a priori argument which, from all but an 

 ultra-pessimistic stand-point, seems almost self-sufficient in its conclu- 

 siveness. The whereabouts of new planets have been discovered by 

 an inductive process based upon the observation of otherwise unac- 

 countable disturbances in the orbits of other stars, and Camper's theory 

 alone would account for an otherwise inexplicable contradiction in the 

 economy of human life. Man's life is too short for the attainment of 

 its highest purposes. Our season ends before its seed has time to yield 

 a harvest ; before a brave dav's work is half done we are overtaken 

 by the night, when no man can work. As the world is constituted, it 

 takes a certain number of years for a new industry to take root and 

 yield its first fruits ; it requires a certain period for a new opinion to 



