THE PROLONGATION OF HUMAN LIFE. 97 



and about one fourth only are still living. The health of the lat- 

 ter, however, is in almost every instance put down as good. The 

 blanks do not tell what would, perhaps, be a valuable thing — how 

 many brothers and sisters the subjects had, and whether or not 

 they died young ; it appears, though, from the names, that few 

 members of the same family have survived, unless it is supposed 

 that the remaining members were older and have died, or enough 

 younger to come under the eighty-year limit. 



Some Conclusions. — Perhaps it is true that only an expert or 

 a philosopher should draw conclusions. I pretend to be neither 

 one nor the other, yet I think a familiarity with the facts gath- 

 ered about these hundreds of old people will excuse anything on 

 my part that might at first thought look like presumption. 

 What I have tried to learn from this vast amount of information 

 that has been collected about these examples of long life are 

 these things : 



What is the influence of the different occupations upon length 

 of life ? 



Does the physical build of a person have anything to do with 

 the length of his life ? 



Can one so regulate his habits of work, sleep, eating, drinking, 

 use of stimulants and narcotics, and exercise, as to prolong life ? 



Is there such a thing as an inherited tendency to long or short 

 life? 



Few of the people accounted for by this census are employees, 

 unless the housewives be called such, and in New England I cer- 

 tainly think they can not be. The occupation that claims most of 

 the men is farming, which means dependence on circumstances 

 and not on men. Of the men and women alike, throughout the 

 list, they are the exceptions who have not been weighted with re- 

 sponsibilities, but responsibilities which, by being borne without 

 intermission, have become fixed habit. The fact that so many of 

 these old people are not employes, considered in conjunction with 

 the fact that the great mass of mankind is made up of wage- 

 workers, points toward a very important conclusion. It seems 

 evident either that a man with the elements of long life within 

 him is more independent in his nature or that a spirit of inde- 

 pendence fostered for years tends to prolong existence. It needs 

 no collection of statistics to prove that, in most cases, one who 

 works during a long period for another has a weaker individual- 

 ity than he who is an employer. The brain of the wage-worker 

 may weigh and measure as much, and his physical strength may 

 be as great, as his who takes the risk of profit and loss upon him- 

 self, but in New England, at least, his life is not so long as the 

 average, and it is rare, as the statistics show, that he lives beyond 

 the age of eighty. This result can not, certainly, be due in any 



VOL. XXXIV. — V 



