Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/561

Rh greater vitality centered in the nervous system, in the muscular, in the respiratory, in the blood, in the membranes?

And wherever centered, what is the endowment?

The difference of tenacity in animals of the same species is more approachable, because we know certain factors that afford an explanation of it.

Age is a factor. In the young the tenacity is more distinctly marked than in the old. In a broad sense there is no exception to this rule.

Degenerations of tissues are factors. Fatty degenerations are reducers of tenacity. Lessened arterial tension is a reducer.

Race or breed is another factor. The strong, wiry, muscular animal of any species is more tenacious of life than the heavier and less elastic. The terrier outlives the spaniel or retriever. The man of sanguine temperament outlives the nervous and lymphatic man.

In the operation of tracheotomy for croup or diphtheria in children, other things being equal, the chances of a successful issue will be as two to one to a spare, active, wiry subject compared with the chances of the full-cheeked, full-bodied child with luscious lips and rich flowing curls of pale or golden hue. The first of these will live almost through the gate of death; the second will succumb without a struggle for life.

Will is a factor. I have twice seen tenacity of life maintained, as it were, against all possibilities by what is called the will of the sufferer. Mr. F. Hall, of Jermyn Street, had a patient in the last stage of pulmonary consumption, whom I had seen with him in what appeared to be a condition of emaciation and exhaustion that precluded the feeblest effort toward rising from bed. Yet one day, and three weeks only before actual death, this sick man by a supreme effort of volition rose, dressed himself, went out of his house, and had to be sought for by his friends and brought back, with gentle compulsion, simply to die.

A young authoress of great promise, suffering from the same disease—pulmonary consumption—in the very last days of her life rose from bed, and in the most vigorous style was engaged for several hours in composition on letters and work which had been for months laid aside. Her friends, bewildered by the phenomenon, could scarcely accredit that the effort did not presage recovery, until rapid collapse dispelled the illusion.

This tenacity of life illustrated through volition is the equivalent of that courageous endurance which some in famine and war have "miraculously" exhibited.

These examples illustrate the influence of certain factors on tenacity of life, and they may, one day, lead up to the prime cause of the difference of tenacity if they and other facts bearing on the matter be carefully observed and recorded. But, as yet, the prime cause remains a troubled and troublous question.—The Asclepiad.