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Longevity, 
[November, 
and this period covers thirty years. At seventy old age 
begins ; the first old age, in which naturally the fruits of 
wisdom are most bountifully developed, and which lasts 
from fifteen years to twenty, to mellow down to a period of 
ripe old age, commencing at eighty-five years and lasting 
fifteen years more, i.e., until the constant is attained. 
“ And yet there need not now be death ; for though, as 
Lord Bacon has said, old men are like ruined towers, and 
though, as Flourens has quoted, youths live in a double 
sense, with forces in reserve and forces in aCtion, vires in 
posse et vires in actn, the radical forces and acting forces of 
Barthez, while old men live only on the forces in aCtion, 
4 vhes in actu,’ possessing no reserve, it is wonderful how 
the forces in adtion will continue after the reserve is with- 
drawn. This kind of half-life has continued unquestionably 
many years beyond the fulness of age, both in man and 
lower animals, and to give it twenty years beyond the 
natural hundred is to be just without being in any extreme 
sense generous. 
“ What we call death is gravitation ; what we call disease 
is some accidental shot infiidted, it may be, while still the 
self-resistance to gravitation is in operation ; what we call 
natural death is the gradual overweighting, at different 
periods, of the natural powers, reserve and adting, by the 
persistent force that bears us down. We cease to grow at 
a certain stage of our life, because of the resistance of this 
downward force ; we cease to increase in size from the 
same cause ; we consolidate in strudture from the same 
cause ; we bend in old age from the same cause ; and we 
die from the same cause. Every step has pradtically been 
a death from the same cause. 
“ If the civilised world would continue in the ascendant, 
it must learn to live. An average life of forty-one, and 
under favourable circumstances of forty-nine years, with a 
world of disease and death up to that period, and a scat- 
tered struggle of the fittest for an exceptional existence 
into ripe old age, cannot maintain the relative efficiency of 
any nation, except in a world universally and equally bad.” 
As an answer to the question how civilised man should 
live in order that the natural term may be found, Dr. Rich- 
ardson created an ideal people, having an ordinary term of 
life of one hundred, and prospective term of one hundred 
and twenty years. 
This ideal people, believing that all cities have an equal 
right and an equal importance, possessed no capital city, no 
special seat of government, no professed politicians, no 
