HAPPINESS SECRET

Gisborne Times, Volume LVI, Issue 6322, 27 February 1922, Page 3

HAPPINESS SECRET

PROFESSOR ON LOVE AND

LONG LIFE

A cheerful and hopeful hook, so written that it can be read with pleasure by all, is Professor J. Arthur Thomson's “The Control of Life.” Its central idea is that by making proper use of science “man can get rid of many hindrances that slow his progress." In proving this it ranges over a vast variety of topics. . The scientific breeding or man is rendered difficult by the unfortunate fact that wo cannot choose our ancestors. Of these, he says, in the tenth generation each of us has no fewer than 1024. The proper mating of man is important. The least successful fallings m love are those which are the outcome of too specialised attraction, too purely physical, too purely aestheticm, too purely intellectual. The lasting basis is manifold, not simple. The three sails of a happy marriage are organic fondness, intellectual sympathy, and some capacity for actual working together. . There is much to be said

for what is in point of fact very frequent—the marriage of djis-

isimilars. Must wo die? Professor Ihomson asks, and points out that certain living creatures, continually make good their wear and tear “and seem in natural conditions to he exempt from natural death.” Put they aie the lowest organisms and man is the highest. Death, certain and inevitable, is the price of his greatness. He can prolong life by adopting not Metchnikoff’s sour milk, but a. cheerful temper, whiili is here declared to bo a preservative of the tisues and cells—“the oil of joy makes the limbs more supple and the face to shine." ,