FU TI-TIENG.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 89, 17 April 1939, Page 6

FU TI-TIENG.

THE PLANT OF LIFE.

The cablegram of the story of a Chinese Methuselah who departed this life in 1933, aged , 250, with his twenty-four wives (timid bachelors, take heart!) at Peking, sounds like a journalistic fairy etory. Chang-li Yuii (the name given to this hoary double-barrelled centurian) wae bom in the daye of our Merry Monarch, King Charles, and having lived through the reigns of eleven English Kings, died in that George V. —and his twenty-fourth wife still survives him, hale and hearty, in troubled China to-day.

The etory continues that the extraordinary longevity of Chang-li Yun, was due to a tea made from a certain herb which ho used regularly throughout hie active and long existence. But if we take Chang-li Yun with hie 25(i years and his twenty-four wives cum grano ealis —it is true that there is a herb renowned in China and India for many generations as an elixir of life, and which has a reputation as a food plant possessing great life-sustaining properties. * Hydrocotyle Asiatica.

The plant is known to botanist*, ae Hydrocotyle Asiatica—a low-growing herb with round, serrated leaves and distantly related to our English pennyworts. Hydrocotyle Asiatiea is known to European doctors practising in Peking, and the French Government has imported and grown it successfully at their experimental station in Algiers, as has also the British Government at the Ayurvedic College of Research of Colombo (Ceylon) for the purposes of cultivating and studying the medicinal and food values of this plant.

The London Herbal Institute, in a review published on Hydrocotyle Asiatica, states: "Professor Menier, of Paris, has diecovered that the herb contains a new vilumiu not known in any other food or substanco. This vitamin (labelled vitamin G) exerts a rejuvenating influence on the ductless glands, the healthy functioning of which causes the brain and body to be maintained in youthful activity, the leaves of it having a marked energising offeet upon the nerve and brain cells." M. 1\ <le Layman, writing in "Health and Life," says: "I have given close attention to H. Aeiatica for some time and found it in practice to be, in my opinion, the finest of herbal tonics. It certainly has no equal in the treatment of general debility—digestion is strengthened and metabolism increased, with improvement in the appearance of the patient. It is important that it should not be stale, as it loses after a while much of its virtue. It has a pleasant, mildly bitter taste with a mint-like flavour, and seems more efficacious when some of the root ie included." The Elixir of Life. I set down these alleged fact* concerning Hydrocotyle Asiatica, but all through herbal history there have been changing fashions concerning the use of herbs, and many of them have been allegedly endowed with medical virtues which time has discounted. The Elixir of Life is not to be found in any one single plant, or, indeed, in anj' medicine. Longevity depends on, first, being born of parents and ancestors of strong and lengthy lives, and this, combined with temperance in our own lives in food; drink and habits, together with a mentality that takes the "slings and arrows" of existence calmly, that nurses neither frets nor worries overmuch— and withal the precious quality of laughter, especially at one'e own shortcomings and trial* —age, at its best or worst, is not to be counted in years, but by the fitness or otherwise of our bodies and niinde. —HEXRY J. HAYWARD.

A LONELY LIFE. There were 850 application* to Jthe National Trust, England, for the position of warden of the nature reserves on the Calf of Man, a small, rocky fragment of the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. The position will be given to a married couple. There is a well-built farmhouse on the little island for their home, and they will have about- 60 aeres of arable land on which to gTOW vegetables and. flowers. Among the applicants -were people in all walks of life, now living in town and village all over the country, who want to get away from the normal civilised conditions. In their final choice the trust selected for the poet a couple with , - experience in fending for themselves and with a genuine love of wild life. A telephone to one of the two lighthouees off the island, and a rowing boat for trips to the Isle of Man will be their only linke with the outside world.

MUSEUM TREASURES. One of Britain's greatest treasures—the Britten Museum Library of nearly 5,000,000 volumes —will have to remain in London and run" the risk of air bombardment in the event of war. This fact was made plain by Sir John Fomlyjce, Director and Principal Librarian, discussing the Museum's A.R.P. plan* with a "Xews-Chroniclc" reporter. "Broadly speaking, - we have completed a plan for general evacuation of the portable exhibits in the museum," he said, "hut 1 am afraid the evacuation of our library is quite out of the question. The books will have to remain on their shelves stacked exactly ,as they ara to-day, and will have to rely on the general scheme of protection afforded by eandbagri and other guards which the Office of Works provides against damage to the general structure."