Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/106

96 to live to six times that age, or to ninety-six years. Having been called upon to account for the phenomenal ages attributed by the Bible to the patriarchs, he risked the following as an explanation: "Before the flood, the earth was less solid, less compact, than it is now. The law of gravitation had acted for only a little time; the productions of the globe had less consistency, and the body of man, being more supple, was more susceptible of extension. Being able to grow for a longer time, it should, in consequence, live for a longer time than now."

The German Heusler has suggested on the same point that the ancients did not divide time as we do. Previous to the age of Abraham, the year, among some people of the East, was only three months, or a season; so that they had a year of spring, one of summer, one of fall, and one of winter. The year was extended so as to consist of eight months after Abraham, and of twelve months after Joseph. Voltaire rejected the longevity assigned to the patriarchs of the Bible, but accepted without question the stories of the great ages attained by some men in India, where, he says, "it is not rare to see old men of one hundred and twenty years." The eminent French physiologist, Flourens, fixing the complete development of man at twenty years, teaches that he should live five times as long as it takes him to become an adult. According to this author, the moment of a completed development may be recognized by the fact of the junction of the bones with their apophyses. This junction takes place in horses at five years, and the horse does not live beyond twenty-five years; with the ox, at four years, and it does not live over twenty years; with the cat at eighteen months, and that animal rarely lives over ten years. With man, it is effected at twenty years, and he only exceptionally lives beyond one hundred years. The same physiologist admits, however, that human life may be exceptionally prolonged under certain conditions of comfort, sobriety, freedom from care, regularity of habits, and observance of the rules of hygiene; and he terminates his interesting study of the last point ("De la Longévité humaine") with the aphorism, "Man kills himself rather than dies."

Another physiologist, Dr. Huferand, wrote in 1841 in the "Journal de la Société de Statistique universelle": "There is nothing to prevent our considering the most remote terms which the known examples of longevity offer to us as forming the extreme limit of human life, or as the ideal of perfection, as a model, finally, of what the nature of man is capable of under favorable circumstances. Experience attests that one may live to one hundred and fifty and even to one hundred and sixty years. More than this, the autopsy of Thomas Parr, who died at one hundred and fifty-two years, which showed that all his viscera were perfectly sound, proves that he might have lived still longer, if the new kind of life that he led in consequence of a change in his conditions of existence had not determined a mortal