414 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



informs us that Moses was ' an hundred 'and twenty years old ; his 

 eye was not dim nor his natural force abated.' There is nothing in- 

 credible in this record, for similar instances are not very rare. A 

 colored woman died in Philadelphia in January, 1906, who seemed to 

 have pretty clear recollections of Washington at Valley Forge. Her 

 friends claimed for her the age of one hundred and thirty-five. A 

 writer in a recent issue of the Monthly Rpview mentions a number of 

 Kaffirs still living in 1885 who professed to have taken part in a battle 

 in 1818. Burton made the acquaintance of a chief, whom he described 

 in 1857 as a very old man; but eighteen years later Cameron found him 

 still ruling his people and very little changed in appearance. While 

 Humboldt was in Lima an Indian died there at the age of one hundred 

 and forty-three. " Blindness overtook him at the age of one hundred 

 and thirty, but till that misfortune he used to walk three or four 

 leagues daily." He also declares that during his five years' residence 

 in Mexico and South America he saw no person afflicted with bodily 

 disease or even with squinting. Tschudi says that one hundred and 

 thirty years ' with unimpaired faculties ' is not at all uncommon in 

 Peru. These references are doubtless to natives; and what is true of 

 the so-called lower races does not necessarily hold good of the more 

 advanced peoples. Among the more recent cases that are thoroughly 

 authenticated are the Hon. David Work, of Fredericton, 1ST. B., who 

 died in 1905, nearly one hundred and two years old. He was a man 

 of mark in his community, and mentally and physically sound almost 

 to the end. The celebrated French chemist, Chevreul, who died in 

 Paris in 1889, was about a year older. John Wesley at eighty-five 

 writes that he is " not quite so agile as he was in times past and his 

 sight is a little decayed." Most persons, unless their observations have 

 been very limited, have met individuals who lived close upon fivescore 

 years or even beyond. Several Eoman writers likewise give 120 years 

 as the utmost limit of human life. Sight is preeminently the civilizing 

 sense ; upon it all progress depends, or, as Oken expresses it, " Sight 

 is the light sense. Through it we become acquainted with universal 

 relations, this being reason. Without the eye there would be no 

 reason." The same thought is expressed in the Sermon on the Mount : 

 " The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is unclouded your 

 whole body will be lighted up ; but if your eye be diseased your whole 

 body will be dark." Not only painting, sculpture and architecture are 

 dependent upon sight, but language also as soon as it becomes the 

 transmitter of experience, whether inner or outer, from age to age. 

 Those peoples that never cultivate speech beyond the point where it is 

 perceived by the ear alone, never advance farther than the primitive 

 stage. But as soon as speech becomes cognizable by the sight, it can be 

 employed to fix the experience and the accumulated knowledge of each 

 generation. It is by means of our eyesight that we are able to learn the 



