LONGEVITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 177, 29 July 1938, Page 6

LONGEVITY.

ITS SECRET IS UNKNOWN., "Is there any recipe for old agel" asked tlio Rev. N. Kynaston fiaskell in a 8.8.0. broadcast recently. "The Bishop of London attributes his wonderful health at 80 to his total abstinence. non-smoking and regular exercise. This may be so. but experience drawn from the 33 centenarians I have known does not bear it out. Some took alcohol, some did not; some were smokers, others not; there were those who had lived easv, sedentary lives, and there were those whose lives had been hard and laborious; some had had serious illnesses and privations, severe injuries and operations—but in nearly every case they came from good healthy stock, and often from families remarkable for longevity; "born strong" as one • tough veteran "put it to me (And it should be noted that the Bishop of London's mother lived to be 96.) "There was one case that I was able fully to investigate. It was of a family, named Kempe, of eleven children whose forbears numbered a centenarian and a grandmother of 90. The ages reached by the ten (for one 1 aied in infancy) were respectively—97 87 90 104. 94. 83, 94, 77. 80 and 85. Thfc, fe'the most striking instance that I can adduce but in some degree, the same is true of the majority of the centenarians I have known In many cases, of course, it is hard to get accurate figures, but the evidence seems to show that it is family history that accounts for longevity. Statistics show", I believe that women live longer than men; only one-third of the centenarians I have known were men. "Modern surgery, of course, lengthens human life, even more to-day. than at the end >t the nineteenth century, when a man of my acquaintance, agei about 65, had to undergo, i very serious operation. It was considered i case of 'touch and go.' Yet I saw his leath announced in the papers not so lonigo at the ag P of a hundred. It is all well summed up in a pi vtur C that once appeared in Pnnch where the reporter asks an old ITT It, ° W, ' nt do ? mi att »bnte your long lfej Terse vera nee, just perseverance I fcep on living in spite of everything.'"