358 ' LIFE AND DEATH. 



7 : i. The animal whose development lasts two years 

 would thus have 14 years of life. This law would 

 give us 140 years, but the figure is too high, and 

 Flourens has reduced the ratio to that of 5 : i, which 

 would still give us 120 years. Plato died in the act 

 of conversation at 81 ; Isocrates wrote his Pana- 

 thena'icus at 94; Gorgias died in the full possession 

 of his intellect at 107. 



To reach the end of the promised longevity we 

 must neither count on the elixir of life nor on the 

 potable gold of the alchemists, nor on the stone of 

 immortality which did not prevent its inventor, 

 Paracelsus, from dying at the age of 58, nor on 

 transfusion, nor on Graham's celestial bed, nor on 

 King David's gerocomy, nor on any nostrum or 

 remedy. Contra vim mortis non est medicamen in 

 hortis, said the Salernian school. What Feuchter- 

 sleben said is most true, " The art of prolonging life 

 consists in not cutting it short," and it is a hygiene, 

 but a brilliant hygiene, such as that of which 

 Metchnikoff traces us the future lines, which will 

 realize the desires of nature. 



And now shall we find that physiology has solved 

 the enigma proposed by the Sphinx, and that it has 

 answered these poignant questions: Whence do 

 we come ? whither do we go ? what is the end of 

 life ? The end of life is, to the physiologist as well 

 as to Herbert Spencer, the tendency towards an 

 existence as full and as long as possible, towards a 

 life in conformity with real nature freed from the 

 discordancies which still remain ; it is the accom- 

 plishment of the harmonious cycle of our normal 

 evolution. This ideal human nature, without dis- 

 cordancies, no longer vitiated as it is at present but 



