Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/642

620 Among the centenarians on our own list, the intellect is stated to have been high in eleven and low in five only; twenty are reported as strong, sixteen of average strength, and twelve only as feeble. Several were remarkable for mental and bodily activity and energy during their long lives. Many had been engaged in hardy bodily toil, or mental work, or successfully, in various occupations, and, in different ways, had played their parts effectually on the world's stage to the end of the long drama in better plight than the poet has represented them. I often wish Shakespeare had lived to give a brighter version of his seven stages, and to portray the old man not lean and slippered, but well favored and booted, keen in life's interests, and happy in promoting the welfare and enjoyment of others. Even in the bedridden state, of which the tables give seven examples (four males and three females), one of whom had been bedridden for seven years, all is not cheerless. The quiet coziness, the even temperature, the freedom from exposure, and the reservation to the vital organs of nerve-energy and nutritive material, consequent on the diminished use of the muscular system contribute to prolong the lives of some feeble persons who still retain the pleasures of intellectual occupation and social intercourse, to say nothing of the enjoyment of sleep and the gratification of the appetite; and it is curious, though not unfrequently to be observed, that persistence in bed actually increases both sleep and appetite. Some aged people lie in bed in the winter; and, in the dull routine of the workhouse, many old people drift into the bedridden state.

In our tables, as usual, in records of longevity, the women preponderate over the men (thirty-six to sixteen), in spite of the dangers incidental to child-bearing and the diseases associated with the varying demands made, at different periods, upon the organs connected with that process. This is obviously, in great measure, to be attributed to the comparative immunity of the woman from the exposures and risks to which man is subjected, as well as to her greater temperance in eating and drinking, and her greater freedom from the anxieties attendant upon the world's labor and business. Still, as I have said in a former essay ("British Medical Journal," May 9, 1885, page 928), there appears also to be a greater inherent vitality in the female, as evinced by the fact that, even in the first year of life, when the conditions and exposures of male and female infants are the same, the mortality of girls is less than that of boys. A somewhat larger number of boys are born, but they are more difficult to rear, so that the females