Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/52

40  des Savants.' He always enjoys good health, and 'eats more than I do,' says M.Chevreul, fils" His temperance grew out of a repugnance which he contracted in youth to wines and liquors, and extends to smoking.

His favorite topic is colors, respecting which, our correspondent says, "he would insist on sitting up in bed and giving a demonstration on the propagation of colors. His strong point was that the 'colors are in us, and the cause in the things we look at' (de hors). Although he had talked a great deal during the day, there was no stopping him when once the started on the color question, or getting him to change the subject; and when we rose to leave, he protested that we were going away because his exposition wearied us." He is as earnest and enthusiastic a student yet as if he had another hundred years before him. "No man, perhaps, has seen his country pass through so many revolutions, and has lived under so many régimes as M.Chevreul. He remembers Louis XVI. His recollections of the Revolution and the Directoire are clear, though he was not then at Paris. He can call up pictures of the glory and the dignity of the First Empire. He has lived under the First Restoration, the Hundred Days, the Restoration of 1815, the Legitimist rule of 1830, the Republic of 1848, the Second Empire of 1852, and the Third Republic—in all eleven régimes, which is tolerably good for one lifetime."

The lesson has been drawn from M.Chevreul's life of what one writer styles "the physical wholesomeness of sustained labor." Cases of extreme longevity are usually found either among persons who live in almost complete inactivity of mind and are thus subject to no wear whatever from their nervous and intellectual faculties, or else among those who spend their lives in constant, vigorous thought. Persons of the class between these, who learn and pursue some business which in time becomes largely a matter of routine and ceases to call out exertion of the powers, usually die early, or at a moderate old age. Hence, the wonderful brightness and activity which we sometimes admire among very old persons, is not so wonderful after all, but is a part of their old age, and one of the causes that have enabled them to enjoy it. And the general rule is sustained, in the case of M.Chevreul, as in the case of numerous other men who have served the world or are serving it at ages far beyond threescore and ten, that "the harmonious development of all the many-sided aspects of man is the most conducive to the health of the individual, and that the training of the brain may be as valuable as the training of the muscles."