5 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



below " since last year ! " insidiously intimating that in another year 

 or so you will have nearly as fine a chest as Heenan ! And you, poor 

 deluded victim, are more than half willing to believe that your in- 

 creasing size is an equivalent to increasing health and strength, espe- 

 cially as your wife emphatically takes that view, and regards your 

 augmenting portliness with approval. Ten years have now passed 

 away since you were forty, and by weight twelve stone and a half a 

 fair proportion for your height and build. Now you turn the scale to 

 one stone more, every ounce of which is fat ; extra weight to be carried 

 through all the labors of life. If you continue your present dietary 

 and habits, and live five or seven years more, the burden of fat will 

 be doubled ; and that insinuating tailor will be still congratulating 

 you. Meantime you are " running the race of life " a figure of speech 

 less appropriate to you at the present moment than it formerly was 

 handicapped by a weight which makes active movement difficult, up- 

 stair ascents troublesome, respiration thick and panting. Not one 

 man in fifty lives to a good old age in this condition. The typical 

 man of eighty or ninety years, still retaining a respectable amount 

 of energy of body and mind, is lean and spare, and lives on slender 

 rations. Neither your heart nor your lungs can act easily and 

 healthily, being oppressed by the gradually gathering fat around. 

 And this because you continue to eat and drink as you did, or even 

 more luxuriously than you did, when youth and activity disposed of 

 that moiety of food which was consumed over and above what the body 

 required for sustenance. Such is the import of that balance of unex- 

 pended aliment which your tailor and your foolish friends admire, and 

 the gradual disappearance of which, should you recover your senses 

 and diminish it, they will still deplore, half frightening you back to 

 your old habits again by saying, " You are growing thin : what can 

 be the matter with you?" Insane and mischievous delusion ! 



It is interesting to observe that the principle I have thus endeav- 

 ored to illustrate and support, little as it is in accordance with the pre- 

 cept and practice of modern authority, was clearly enunciated so long 

 ago as the sixteenth century. The writings of Luigi Cornaro, who was 

 born of noble family in Venice soon after the middle of the fifteenth 

 century, and was contemporary for seventy years with Titian, wrote 

 his first essay on the subject of regimen and diet for the aged when 

 eighty-three years of age, producing three others during the subse- 

 quent twelve years.* His object was to show that, with increasing 

 age and diminished powers, a corresponding decrease in the quantity 



* " Discorsi delta Vita Solria, del Signor Luigi Cornaro." An English edition, with 

 translation, was published by Benjamin White, at Horace's Head, in Fleet Street, Lon- 

 don, 1768. Cornaro's first work was published in Padua in 1658. In his last, a letter 

 written to Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia, he gives a description of his health and vigor 

 when ninety-five years old. A paper in the " Spectator " was one of the first notices of 

 him in this country. See vol. iii, No. 195. 



