i 3 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



distance, provided the direction of the race was to be more or less up- 

 hill, not down-hill or over a sandy level. But the amateur runners of 

 the Grecian and Roman armies frequently engaged in contests with 

 race-horses and trained hounds without any such reservations ; and 

 Pindar sung the praises of a Rhodian athlete who could keep pace with 

 a relay of four trotting horses, and tire them out successively. 



The hemerodromes, or foot-couriers of ancient Greece, made from 

 eighty to ninety miles a day, and the volunteer messenger who arrived 

 in Athens with the news of the victory of Marathon on the night after 

 the battle, must have run at the rate of fourteen miles an hour. Dion 

 Chrysostomus speaks of a Thessalian patriarch who had followed the 

 trade of a hemerodrome for upward of ninety years, having made his 

 first trip on his twentieth birthday, and his last after the completion of 

 his hundred and tenth year. During this long career, as his life might 

 well be called, he had never been known to betray a trust, never was 

 behind time, and never had been sick for a single hour. 



Longevity was not the least of the benefits which the ancients de- 

 rived from their health-giving exercises. The second census of Trajan 

 furnishes some curious statistics on this subject, and shows that among 

 the 28,000,000 inhabitants of Northern Italy, Greece, and Magna Grce- 

 cia (Southern Italy and Sicily), there were 11,000 centenarians, 750 of 

 whom had passed sixscore years, eighty-two their one hundred and fif- 

 tieth, and twenty their one hundred and seventy-fifth year of life, 

 while three were double centenarians and respectively two hundred 

 and six, two hundred and eight, and two hundred and eighteen }'ears 

 of age. Four brothers of an Albanian family had all passed their hun- 

 dred and tenth year. The same census shows that, among the indolent 

 races of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine, the proportion of centena- 

 rians to every 1,000,000 of inhabitants was considerably lower and not 

 much above the present average. 



That the Hebrew Psalmist's threescore and ten was not our original 

 term of life will not be denied by orthodox readers of the Mosaic gene- 

 alogies, and the ablest biologists agree that it would be far below the 

 normal average even now, if our manner of life itself was not wholly 

 abnormal. It would explain the most vexing contradictions and enigmas 

 of our existence if we could be sure that by strict observance of the 

 health-laws of Nature the Psalmist's maximum might be increased by 

 thirty or forty years : it would amount to a satisfactory solution of the 

 whole problem of life. Under the present condition of things our lives 

 are mostly half-told tales, dramas ending in the middle of the first act ; 

 our season terminates before the tree of life has had time to ripen its 

 fruits. That " hunger after immortality " which is often alleged as a proof 

 of a future existence, arises most likely from an instinctive perception 

 of the truth that our present spans of life are too short for reaching the 

 goal of our destination ; for those vague yearnings were unknown to 

 the Semitic and Grecian patriarchs. They died in peace, " full of 



