6i8 



NATURE 



[pa. 23, 1879 



them, almighty will. The constant of human life is naturally 

 one hundred years. 



" In this statement I, for one, gathered up, on the occasion 

 referred to, something never to be forgotten. The constant was 

 before us in all its truthfulness. But more remains. Because 

 the fulness of age is one hundred year?, it is not an essential that 

 death shall immediately crown the advent of that fulness. To 

 certain parts of the [scheme of natural life there is a boundary. 

 The period of maturity of development has its boundary of twenty 

 years ; when the body, as Flourens says, ceajes to grow ; but if 

 it ceases, in the ordinary sense of the term, to grow it does not 

 cease to increase ; its nutrition improves and perfects for twenty 

 years more at least, and then only has reached its completed 

 physical condition. It should never from that period gain in 

 weight, and for a long time it should not lose. It goes on now 

 through a third period, which Flourens admirably calls the 

 period of invigoration, during which all its parts become firmer, 

 all its functions more certain, all its organization more perfect ; 

 and this period covers thirty years. At seventy old age begins ; 

 i\is first old age, in which naturally the fruits of wisdom are most 

 bountifully developed, and which lasts from fifteen years to 

 twenty, f o mellow down to a period of rijie old age, commencing 

 at eighty- five years and lasting fifteen years more, i.e., until the 

 constant is attained. 



" And yet there need not now be death ; for though, as Lord 

 Bacon has said, old men are like ruined towers, and though, as 

 Flourens has quoted, youths live in a double sense, with forces 

 in reserve and forces in action, vires iyi posse ct vires in adu, the 

 radical forces and acting forces of Barthez, while old men live 

 only on the forces in action, 'vires in actu,' possessing no 

 reserve, it is wonderful how the forces in action will continue 

 after the reserve is withdrawn. This kind of half-life has 

 continued unquestionably many years beyond the fulness of age, 

 both in man and lower animals, and to give it twenty years 

 beyond the natural hundred is to be just without being in any 

 extreme sense generous. 



" In this anatomical reading 'of human life" we see the growth, 

 the increase, the invigoration, and the solidification, of the 

 body : we see the life with its reserve on its two threads ; the 

 life without reserve on its one thread ; and, finally, — the force 

 in action being withdrawn — the life ceasing, and the earth, 

 proclaiming her mastery, dragging the actor as unconsciously 

 to herself at death, as he was unconsciously projected into the 

 world at birth. 



"All through this presentation of natural fact, moreover, 

 there runs another physical truth. Death is centripetal action. 

 Those two birds on the wing which up to heaven's gate sing, 

 are physically filled, like the gyroscope, with the vires in posse 

 et vires in actu, powers in reserve and powers in action. ■ Yon 

 wanton sportsman libenites a ball which pierces one bird, and 

 the earth claims its prey. The living gyroscope falls. The 

 fellow bird escapes. In time, it fails to rise to the same height, 

 its force in reserve being withdrawn, but its force in action 

 remains, and it lives on. At last, some trifling extra call 

 upon it is final, and the triumphing earth brings it down 

 to itself. That first bird fell from an interference with its 

 life while yet it had its two powers ; that second bird fell 

 from failure of powers at different periods, but from the same 

 inevitable, always present cause, the attraction of the earth. 



" The same is true of men also. What we call death is gravi- 

 tation : what \^ e call disease, is some accidental shot inflicted, 

 it may be, while still the self-resistance to gravitation is in 

 operation : what we call natural death is the gradual over- 

 weighting, at different periods, of the natural powers, reserve 

 and acting, by the persistent force that bears us down. We 

 cease to grow at a certain stage of our life, because of the 

 resistance of this downward force : we cease to increase in size 

 from the same cause : we consolidate in structure from the 

 same cause : we bend in old age from the same cause : and 

 we die from the same cause. Every step has practically been 

 a death from the same cause. 



"As these facts appear, we are inclined to ask. How many of 

 all men and women projected into life and charged with the 

 reserve and acting forces, — how many die with these forces 

 intact up to the time of death, .and how many with the acting 

 force alone in operation? How many, if I may use the 

 simile, die on the wing, fall headlong to the earth, shot by 

 some wanton shaft that need never have been discharged ? 

 How many sink naturally to the earth from her final and gentle 

 embrace ? 



" The answer to this question appals the mind. The answer 

 rings out : — Man reckless of life ! every lower animal you do 

 not immolate beats you in this ! Man ! civilized as you 

 are proud to say, you have never yet given life a chance ! 

 Man of reserve and action, you die on the wing more certainly 

 than the birds of the air on which you practise your fatal 

 sports ! You die within the first part of the second third of 

 your natural lives. Let the elephant die at sixty, the camel 

 at sixteen, the horse at ten, the dog at four, the cat at 

 three years, and the rabbit at two years, and they will 

 then match you in the value of life you train yourself to 

 possess. Man, endowed with knowledge of science, who 

 can divide the year into seasons, and history into centuries 

 and eras ; who can calculate the courses of the planets and 

 predict their crossings and shadows; weigh the earth, as in 

 a balance, and predicate storms and tempests, you have yet 

 to learn that, with the precision that regulates all these 

 things, your own life is meted out, — that such a childhood means 

 such an adolescence, such an adolescence such a maturity, such a 

 maturity such a decline, and such a decline such a periodof death. 



Nay more ; man so endowed does sometimes see by adventure, 

 as it were, the whole law fulfilled without his studying for it or 

 expecting it. Some individual lives the whole natural period ot 

 life, exceptionally, as an elephant, a horse, a lion, a dog, a cat 

 lives it ordinarily, and thus by adventure, proves the truth ot 

 the law which has been laid down. The event, perfectly 

 commonplace in the case of a lower animal, —a dog that lives 

 to ten, — is a perfect marvel when it happens to a man who 

 lives to a hundred years, the equal term. To see a centenarian 

 we travel miles and miles, and discuss the time of his birth w ith 

 keenest criticism, so truly unnatural is the state of things under 

 which human existence at present is unfulfilled. 



' ' The question arises. How long is this condition of affairs to 

 last ? No more vital question stands for solution at the bar of 

 civilisation. 



' ' The day, in fact, has now arrived, when the cultivation of life 

 by the cultivated of mankind is the primary art for the con- 

 tinuance of the cultivated. If the civilised world would continue 

 in the ascendant, it must learn to live. An average life of forty- 

 one and under favourable circumstances of forty-nine years, with 

 a world of disease and death up to that period, and a scattered 

 struggle of the fittest for an exceptional existence into ripe old- 

 age, cannot maintain the relative efficiency of any nation, 

 except in a world universally and equally bad. Ingenuity itself 

 is bounded by life ; device by faculty for devising. Weapons 

 of precision give us victory over savages. Is that success? 

 Weapons are made, not begotten, and savage tribes, fierce for 

 contest and unscrupulous, may readily learn to apply what the 

 civilised man has devised, and in repetition of history, make easy 

 work of the short-lived civilised. 



" We Sanitarians are forced by our studies to recognise these 

 truths. We exi^t, if we exist for any great purpose at all, to 

 protest against the casting away of nearly two-thirds of the life 

 that is meted out for civilised men. We exist to protest that it 

 is not a scientific civilisation which can permit such reckless 

 waste of the gift that stands above all values and qualities ; and 

 our protest is the more earnest as we detect that the waste 

 which we observe, is actually not at the time of life after the 

 prime has been reached, but is most destructive in the very 

 budding of life, and continues at the intermediate stages between 

 the period of budding and the prime. 



"To speak in plain terms, — and if ever plain terms were 

 demanded, they are demanded now, — the world in this matter 

 of life and death has, by daily observation of the phenomena, 

 got into the habit of looking on wrong as right, and on what is 

 practically suicidal death as death that is natural. It is a strange 

 fatuity. If we were, for a short time, to see the lower domestic 

 creatures under the same curse ; if we were to witness horses 

 enjoying ten, dogs four, and cats three years, as an average 

 duration of their lives, we should think a persistent murrain had 

 come upon them, and that, in relation to these useful domestic 

 animals, the whole course of life had undergone a deteriorative 

 change. Yet th;it is what, in effect, we are observing amongst 

 our own kind, so that the Sanitarian in despair may exclaim : 

 ' Oh that man were as wise as the horses and dogs, that he 

 might have the bounty of life which the Allwise has awarded to 

 him as the natural bounty, extended and beautified and exalted 

 by the intelligence with which he is endowed above the beasts.' 

 "I press the question. Why should we, of all animals, 

 perish as we do in the first part of the second third of our 



