HUMAN LONGEVITY. 115 



consult these valuable reports. They possess the further 

 advantage of being readily brought into comparison with the 

 corresponding tables, more or less perfect, furnished from 

 other European kingdoms and from the United States ; many 

 of which tables are in fact contained in the volumes of 

 English registration. 



We shall have occasion to allude to some of these reports 

 hereafter. But meanwhile we may state, as the result from 

 them, that they utterly refute the doctrine which forms the 

 pith and purport of M. Flourens's volume. Such formal 

 refutation was in truth hardly needed of an opinion contra- 

 dicted, as we have before said, by the common experience of 

 mankind of every age and country. A hundred years is 

 not, and has never been, the natural or normal age of man. 

 No deviations from a life of nature, no excesses of luxury, 

 or labours and privations of poverty, -will suffice to ex- 

 plain the disparity between the doctrine in question, and the 

 facts as they stand in face of it. M. Flourens dwells with 

 complacent detail on the old and familiar instance of Louis 

 Cornaro, the Venetian self-reformer ; a notable one, doubt- 

 less, if we may trust to its correctness in all particulars ; but 

 bearing marks of exaggeration ; and at best but an individual 

 case, where the argument needs a multitude. If seeking for 

 any causes likely to affect and alter the term of life on a large 

 scale, we should rather expect to find them in the extra- 

 ordinary diversity of physical conditions to which mankind 

 are exposed ; and especially in those conditions which belong 

 to the extremes of climates in different parts of the globe. 

 But M. Flourens himself rejects these causes as of little or 

 no influence upon what he assumes as the normal term of life ; 

 and though we dispute his doctrine on the latter point, we 

 agree with him so far as to believe that the external physical 

 conditions to which man is subjected, have less influence than 

 might be supposed upon the average duration of existence. 



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