Human Physiology. 223 



feeling of being lost. The savage, on the contrary, strikes 

 across a forest, or travels in darkness, or a dense fog, with 

 perfect confidence, and is never wrong or lost. He goes like 

 the bee to his hive ; he may not be able to tell how he does it, 

 but it is not by the observation of trees, or any indications of 

 direction. He simply goes by a sort of consciousness of space 

 in the way he does not see but feels to be right. It is the 

 action of what phrenologists call the faculty of locality an 

 instinct of place. 



A similar power seems to reside in the faculty of numbers. 

 There are men, children sometimes, who can give in a moment, 

 almost before the question is asked, the result of very large 

 arithmetical operations; such, for example, as the number of 

 inches to the sun, or the number of seconds in a thousand 

 years, or things more complex and inconceivable. Musical 

 prodigies have displayed inexplicable powers of melody and 

 harmony. 



The amount or persistence of life in any individual may be 

 properly classed as an idiosyncrasy. Some families are long- 

 lived, as others are the reverse. Longevity does not depend 

 upon strength or vigour of constitution, as indicated by external 

 signs. Persons small and weak at birth, ailing in infancy, and 

 feeble in maturity, may yet be very long-lived may outlive 

 hundreds more hardy in their seeming. It does not depend 

 entirely on healthy conditions or habits. We have aged, 

 libertines and aged drunkards. Other things being equal, tem- 

 perance and virtue prolong life. As a rule, vice and intemper- 

 ance lead to disease and early death. When a man brings on 

 disease and death at eighty by gluttony or drink, he probably 

 might have lived twenty or thirty years longer. Artisans in 

 towns are generally short-lived. In some trades it is rare to 

 find a man of forty, and the average life is twenty or twenty- 

 five. Such people give but a small stock of vitality to their 

 offspring. In the middle and upper ranks of English life, and 



