WHO SHALL INHERIT LONG LIFE? 



On the Existence of a Natural Process at Work Among 



Human Beings Tending to Improve the Vigor 



and Vitality of Succeeding Generations 



By Dr. Alexander Graham Bell 



Author, in the National Geographic Magazine, of "Prizes for the Inventor/'' "Discovery and 

 Invention/' '"Our Heterogeneous System of Weights and Measures/' "Aerial Locomo- 

 tion/' and "A Few Thoughts Concerning Eugenics" 



MOST people die before reaching 

 middle life, and comparatively 

 few live to be old. 



This has always been so from the very 

 earliest times ; and, in spite of modern 

 sanitation and the advance of medical sci- 

 ence, remains true today. Only a small 

 proportion of each generation survives 

 the traditional Biblical age of threescore 

 years and ten. 



Under these circumstances is it not re- 

 markable that so many people should have 

 parents who lived to be old? Seventy is 

 by no means an unusual age for a parent. 

 Examine the history of the people you 

 know and you will find that very few of 

 them had parents who died before sev- 

 enty, while a considerable proportion had 

 parents who lived to be eighty or even 

 much older. 



An examination of several hundred 

 cases, noted in the Genealogy of the Hyde 

 family 1 , shows that 18.7 per cent of these 

 persons lived to be seventy or older ; but 

 81.7 per cent had fathers or mothers who 

 lived beyond seventy. About 13 per cent 

 lived to seventy-five ; but 65 per cent, or 

 nearly two-thirds of • the whole, had 

 fathers or mothers who lived beyond sev- 

 enty-five. 



The contrast is still more marked when 

 we consider persons who lived to extreme 

 old age. Only 8.7 per cent lived to be 

 eighty or older; and yet 48.1 per cent, 

 nearly one-half of the whole, had fathers 

 or mothers 

 older. 



who lived to be eighty or 



1 Genealogy of the Hyde Family, by Reuben 

 H. Walworth, LL. D., 1864; a work relating to 

 the descendants of William Hyde, one of the 

 early settlers of Norwich, Conn., who died in 

 1681. 



These are the results of an investiga- 

 tion of 1,594 cases in which the ages at 

 death of the persons and of their fathers 

 and mothers were all known. 2 



Such results seem to point to the gen- 

 eral conclusion that a very large propor- 

 tion of each generation has sprung from 

 a very small proportion of the preceding 

 generation, namely, from the people ivho 

 lived to be old. 



Another inference is that the long-lived 

 people left more descendants behind them 

 in proportion to their numbers than the 

 others, and therefore, on the average, had 

 larger families. 



Of course, many widowers may have 

 married again when they were well ad- 

 vanced in years and have had families by 

 each marriage, but this explanation does 

 not apply to women. 



mothers' ages an index to the size of 

 their families 



We cannot, for example, suppose that 

 mothers who died at fifty would have had 

 more children had they lived to be sixty 

 or eighty or a hundred ; and yet investi- 

 gation shows that the mothers who lived 

 to extreme old age actually had, on the 

 average, larger families than those who 

 died earlier in life. 



From the Hyde statistics we find that 

 mothers who died before forty had, on 

 the average, only 3.4 children apiece ; and 

 this is intelligible because many of the 

 mothers passed away long before the con- 

 clusion of the reproductive period, and 



2 See "The Duration of Life and Conditions 

 Associated with Longevity, A Study of the 

 Hyde Genealogy," by Alexander Graham Bell; 

 published by the Genealogical Record Office, 

 1601 35th Street, Washington, D. C. $1.00. 



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