Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/644

622 The tables and the analyses of present and past condition yield nothing striking or even novel or unexpected, or in that respect interesting; but they are not therefore less valuable or important. The average centenarian qualities are precisely those which might have been anticipated: a good family history; a well-made frame of average stature (5 feet 8 inches, which is rather above the average, in the male, 5 feet 3 inches in the female); spare rather than stout, robust, with good health, little troubled with ailments of any kind, with good digestion, regular daily action of bowels; active, capable of much exertion, with the restorative advantages of good, sound sleep permitting or inducing early rising; good vocal organs; a good appetite moderately indulged, with little need of, and little consumption of, alcohol or animal food; an energetic yet placid temperament; a good intelligence; the hair holding its ground and its color well; the organs of sight and hearing performing their functions well and long. Our centenarians afford, in short, good examples through life of the mens sana in corpora sano; and in by far the greater number there was a total absence of any evidence of rheumatic or gouty affection, past or present, in the joints of the hands and fingers—a condition which is not unfrequently regarded as one of the heralds of old age, and which, doubtless, like many other local maladies of which it may be taken as a sample, is often prophylactic against other more serious maladies. It seems that the frame which is destined for great age needs no such prophylactics, and engenders none of the peccant humors for which the finger-joints may find a vent. To have a vent for such humors may be good, but it is less good than to be without them. Of the eight in whom those joints were stiff or deformed, it may be observed that one, a man, always "drank as much as I could, and always will do"; a second and third, poor women, had been subject to much exposure, and had a rough life, following the army in various parts of the world; of the case of the fourth, also a female, in whom these joints were stiff, we have no account of the habits. The fifth, a female, appears to have been a temperate person in comfortable circumstances, in whom no particular reason for the deformity of the joints can be assigned; and the same may be said of the sixth and seventh, except that the latter was in the habit of partaking rather freely of animal food, and also probably of the eighth, though we have not much information as to her past habits. It is rather remarkable that all of these, except the first, are females; of these females, three were poor, and the others in comfortable or in affluent circumstances.

Teeth.—The loss of teeth presents some interesting problems. It seems to be an associate of civilization, partly because the varied and peculiar conditions of civilized life tend to induce it, and partly because those conditions have the effect of preserving the body beyond the limits, which, under natural or uncivilized conditions, appear to have been assigned to it. Twenty-four of our centenarians had no