590 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE. 
By always choosing the parents “ d’apres des circonstances in- 
dividuelles fixes et toujours les memes dans certaines lignees,” 
he succeeded in obtaining a number of malformations accord- 
ing to his preconceived plan. And such experiments have 
been repeated on dogs, pigeons, and poultry with like suc- 
cess. It is on this fact of individual heritage that longevity 
depends. There is no term of life for the “ species/’ only a 
term for the individual ; a fact which sets all the speculations 
of Cornaro, Hufeland, and Flourens at nought. There are 
limits which neither the u species ” nor the individual can be 
said to pass; no man has been known to live two hundred 
years ; but the number of years which each individual will 
reach, without accident, is a term depending neither on the 
“ species/’ nor on his own mode of life, but on the organiza- 
tion inherited from his parents. Temperance, sobriety, 
and chastity, however desirable, both in themselves and in 
their effects, will not ensure long life ; intemperance, hard- 
ship, and irregularity will not prevent a man living for a cen- 
tury and a half. The facts are there to prove both proposi- 
tions. Longevity is an inheritance. Like talent, it may be 
cultivated ; like talent, it may be perverted ; but it exists in- 
dependent of all cultivation, and no cultivation will create it. 
Some men have a talent for long life. 
M. Charles Lejoncourt published, in 1842, his Galerie des 
Centenaires , in which may be read a curious list of examples 
proving the hereditary nature of longevity. In one page we 
have a day labourer dying at the age of 108, his father lived 
to 104, his grandfather to 108, and his daughter then living 
had reached 80. In another we have a saddler whose grand- 
father died at 112, his father at 113, and he himself at 115; this 
man, aged 113, was asked by Louis XIV what he had done 
to so prolong life ; his answer was — “ Sire, since I was fifty 
I have acted upon two principles ; I have shut my heart and 
opened my wine-cellar.” M. Lejoncourt also mentions a 
a woman then living aged 150, whose father died at 124, and 
whose uncle at 113. But the most surprising of the cases 
cited by Lucas is that of Jean Golembiewski, a Pole, who in 
1846 was still living, aged 102, having been eighty years as 
common soldier, in thirty-five campaigns under Napoleon, 
and having even survived the terrible Russian campaign, in 
spite of five wounds, and a soldier’s recklessness of life. His 
father died aged 121, and his grandfather 130. Indeed, the 
practice of every annuity and insurance office suffices to con- 
vince us of ordinary experience having discovered that length 
of life is somehow dependent on hereditary influence. 
Although instincts, in the general acceptation of the term. 
