140 HUMAN LONGEVITY. 



emotions. Quietude and forbearance form the right rule in 

 our hands, and not premature disuse and abandonment of the 

 faculties committed to us. These beyond doubt are better 

 preserved by their exercise, within the limits we have just 

 denoted. 



Here again we have the authority of Cicero to refer to, 

 and willingly adopt it. He gives us various instances of the 

 exercise and preservation of the mental faculties to an ex- 

 treme age ; and such examples, in truth, are familiar at every 

 period, and to the individual knowledge of us all. We 

 might cite many that have come within our own experience. 

 For the most part, it must be admitted, such cases as these 

 are connected with a sound bodily organisation, concurrently 

 preserved. But this, as we have already stated, is by no 

 means uniformly the case. The disproportion of the two 

 powers makes itself known to us in numberless instances. 

 From the 



Souls that can scarce ferment their mass of clay, 

 to that elsewhere described by the same great poet : 



A fiery soul that working out its way, 



Fretted the pigmy body to decay, 



And o'er informed the tenement of clay, 



we have every grade of relation between the two great 

 faculties, which in their mysterious conjunction make up the 

 nature of man. No more curious, but no more difficult part 

 of human physiology than that of denning these relations, 

 and the conditions which influence and alter them. Here it 

 is that disease often serves us as the best interpreter; by 

 detaching and insulating, as it were, different functions, 

 which in health are so closely associated as to escape all 

 division or definition. 



The Memory is generally the mental faculty which is first 



