Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/780

758 ratio than the unmarried. The average age of the married exceeded that of the unmarried by about fourteen months. This coincides with the results obtained from other sources. So far as I know, all statistics show a smaller mortality rate and a greater longevity among the married than the unmarried. Mr. Darwin urges matrimony as one of the greatest aids to long life, and calls attention to a mass of statistics gathered in France, showing that unmarried men die in far greater proportion than married. Dr. Stark says that bachelorhood ought to be classed with the most unwholesome trades, or with a residence in the most unwholesome districts, so far as danger to life is concerned; and he presents statistics showing that in Scotland the death rate of unmarried men of certain ages was 15 per 1,000 annually, while that of the married men of the same ages was less than half as great. Hufeland says that "all those people who became very old were married more than once, and generally late in life. There is not one instance of a bachelor having attained a great age." Massachusetts statistics present no instance of what may be termed remarkable age, the oldest being one hundred and eighteen, and married; nor do they show whether the individuals mentioned had been married more than once, or late in life. But it is undoubtedly true that the more regular habits and better hygiene of the married, their less degree of exposure, more abundant home comforts, better food in health and better care in sickness and approaching age, together with the moderate and restricted gratification of the sexual appetite—in short, those elements which constitute the environment of the individual—are more favorable to longevity than are the corresponding elements in the unmarried.

Whether this is true in an equal degree of both sexes, however, is more than questionable. Among the Massachusetts centennarians one in eleven of the women had never been married, while among the men the corresponding proportion was only one in twenty-three. Further than this, while there were three times as many women as men among the centennarians as a whole, there were six times as many among the unmarried ones. It would seem to be a fair inference that the effect of celibacy is less fatal to longevity among women than men. Nor is this other than might be expected, when we consider how helpless and dependent is an old man, and how unable to care for himself in the little niceties of life which contribute so largely to health and comfort, and how much less so in all these respects is an old woman.

But it would be a manifest error to conclude that, because the average age of the married exceeds that of the unmarried, therefore this excess of longevity is due to the married state, unless it can first be shown that the individuals composing the two classes