LONGEVITY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1397, 9 May 1865, Page 3

LONGEVITY.

{From the Saturday Review.)

A discussion has lately been carried on in the columns of The Times which has an interest for all persons who care about living. No one, according to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ever lived to the age of a hundred; or, as we should rather say, no one can be shown by sufficient legal proof to have reached that age. * There is nothing, one would have thought, specially irritating about this statement, whether well fouuded or not. It seems, however, to rankle in the minds of a good many respectable antiquaries. As soon as the question is accidentally raised, the supporters of human longevity swarm to its defence with a zeal second only to the theological. They are as much vexed as if every one of them were aged ninety-nine, and were receiving a sentence not to live out the year. The vexation is perhaps natural. Many people can never distinguish between doubts thrown upon their accuracy and doubts thrown upon their veracity. When a man tells you that a friend of his knew an old woman, some years ago, who is at least 110 if she is still alive, he infers confidently that some people live beyond the age of a hundred; if you don't draw the same inference, he fancies that you are doubting his word. Besides this pardonable confusion of ideas, antiquarian enthusiasts have a special ground of annoyance. They feel that most of their beliefs rest upon evidence which is necessarily short of conclusive. In making investigations about old genealogies, the pleasure of the research is almost proportional to the faintness of the evidence. You glory in the keenness of scent which enables you to follow a trail too faint for other perceptions. Many of your pet opinions are only held in default of better evidence. The slightest presumption upon one side is sufficient to carry weight when there is no other presumption to be had. Things might look different in the sunlight, but we must trust to a farthing candle when we have got nothing better. It is, therefore, lit'le short of torture to the mind of the genuine antiquary wheu it is sought to try his conclusions by scientific or legal tests. He thinks it hard that he should be called upon to give an account of his proofs, as if he could put his defunct witnesses into the box. Thus, a gentleman writing to the Times complains bitterly of the present age, as being at once absurdly credulous in some things, and absurdly incredulous in others. People, he says indignantly, are ready to believe that Richard 111. was a respectable character, and yet they won t believe that one Jenkins lived to be 169. Without concerning ourselves to defend, in all points, an age which believes in spirit-rapping, we think this attack upon it very unfair. It is plain that, if we assume perfect equality between the evidence in favour of the villany of Richard 111. and the evidence to establish the extraordinary age of Jenkins, we shall not, therefore, believe in the two facts with the same intensity. It was once, perhaps, quite in character for an uncle in the highest classes to murder his infant nephews, and conceal them in a hole behind the stairs. That line of conduct might even be so intrinsically probable, a priori, that we should believe it until the uncle's innocence was proved. But, on the other hand, it was characteristic that people should accuse Richard of smothering lus young friends, and should believe the accusation' causelessly. The antecedent probabilities are about equal, and we may be reasonably swayed either way by a slight weight of evidence On the very strongest hypothesis, there always remains a possibility that Richard was a misunderstood but virtuous character, for some admixture of falsehood in the authorities is a certainty, though the proportions of the mixture are doubtful. But no one can say that the probabilities are not enormously great against Old Parr having lived to 152, or Jenkins to 169. There is some limit of belief at which our minds, however elastic, cease to vield to almost any evidence. If Jenkins s age had been nut at 969 instead of 169, no one would accept the story, tho<i«h the evidence were infinitely stronger It is indeed rather amusing to observe the extreme faiutneßS of the ground on which our faith in Jenkins is demanded. Some vague gentleman, going to see Jenkins, meets a man over a hundred, whom he congratulates on his vigour in extreme old age, " Ah, sir, it s my father that you want to see," exclaims Jenkins junior. Ihe picturesque intervention of this superfluous centenarian seems to have made the fortune of the & The corroborating circumstances—such as the old men who had always considered Jenkins an old man from their early youth, and Jenkins' own recollect tions of Flodden Field—are the mere common-p ace of such stories. The gentlemen who ask us to bel eve ?hil uto wSiii a kind of evidence which might adequately prove that John Smith was the son of William Smith in the « was no evidence to the contrary! but it ia liiiraiy enough to generate conviction in a statement whto i is next door to miraculous. There is no fixed Hunt to human life, but human life is not therefore of an arbitrary length. A man eight feet high is a rarity and a giant; n man eighty feet high » a fiction. No one can mention ihe exact distance beyond which no rifle can throw a ball, but we may be pretty certain no rifle ever yet threw a ball ten miles. It follows that, as a first step, we must cast aside the discussion of these traditionary old gentlomen until «•« !■»«' d.-c Mcd vvlmt I. the tad weiyht «l scientific scepticism to be met by evidence. By observing the actual length of life of cumbents, and-other persons, the length of w hose days is an object not merely of scientific but of le«al curiosity, we may arrive at some measure of the lin- ■ probability of considerable deviations from the ordinary standard. At least we may seek for statements sufficiently modern to admit of vcriflcatim It is wonderful what a crop of centenarians springs up at the first cursory examination of rnodern records. If we look through-old nurnbersofUe Annual Register, deaths of persons above -100 are m-orded every year. People seem to havebcenin the habit of dying at all kinds of unreasonable agej, and in various remote parts of Europe-Folu , Calabria, or Norway-and having their deaths uuy recorded in the papers of the period. In 1768 aion , three deaths are reported at the respectable ages ot 117 138 and 160. In 1761 an ancient couple is re ported to have died at Philadelphia (Quakers are

proverbially long-lived, and always speak the truth) the husband at the age of 120, and tho wife at the age of US, having been married for ninety-eight yen**. Wo are told of some laborious Gorman who collected considerably more than a thousand cases of persons living to upwards of a hundred. Of these, fifteen had died between the ages of 130 and 140, six between 140 and 160, and ono (our old friend Jenkins, we presume) at 161). It is remarkable that people who live to this incredible extent generally do it in out-of the-way country parishes. A hundred years ago many English country districts might still he considered as partially discovered districts, As the domain of the unknown recedes, the centenarians become suspiciously scarce. They vanish, like the phoenix, the snapping tur'le, or the sea-serpent, before

the approach of civilisation. In modern years, we remark that a considerable proportion of the cases of extreme age, as of apparitions of the sea-serpent are recorded by American witnesses. It may be used in argument, as to the condition of the negro slaves, that they are frequently quoted as living for superhuman periods. We read of slaves who have

been 120 years in one family ; they have generally belonged to General Washington, whose venerable nurse was one of Barnuui's most brilliant triumphs. Hither slaves find their mode of life singularly healthy, or, as the sceptical may allege, their intellects are not clear enough to preserve very accurate records of time.

There is the same prima facic presumption against I these cases that there is against ghosts. They

have an extraordinary faculty for appearing in places where they cannot be too closely investigated. They swarm in every direction just beyond y.our grasp. A few years ago there were plenty of cases ; but the witnesses are dead and buried, and the records are lost. In remote districts, where registers have never

been properly kept, or in new countries, where the population has been incessantly changing, they continue to abound. If you trust to the evidence of ignorant minds, you may get plenty of living specimens who will claim to be any age. In proportion as we demand rigid proof, the proof becomes shadowy and unsatisfactory. Incumbents of livings, strange as the statement may appear to fellows of colleges, never live, to the age of hundred. Annuitants, notwithstanding their proverbial vitality, always die off. In a town where £10 a year is paid to a large number of the oldest inhabitants, not even the oldest inhabitant has succeeded in passing the century. Among statesmen, bishops, and the public characters who ought to live long, if purple and fine linen are conducive to long life, no example

has been produced. Of the cases cited with most confidence, many rest upon the authority of tombstones, the assumption, apparently being that the other parts of an epitaph are always so strictly true that the age is not likely to he falsified. But, of course, if an old gentleman stated before his death that he was HO, aud enjoyed the kind of celebrity which the mere fact of living confers in a country village, his executors would hardly omit .from his tombstone what was probably his chief claitn to be remembered. It is pointed out, besides, that owing to the perversity and blunders of masons even epitaphs are not invariably consistent with themselves. In one case it appears, by a comparison of dates, that a gentleman must have died thirty years before the birth of his wife; and in another, that an old lady, said to be 192 at her death, cannot have married till she was past 100. it might be supposed that fin educated man should know his own age, were it not that the process by which a fiction gradually imposes upon its author is only too familiar to every one who likes to tell a story. To believe your own lies is the first step in the art of lying gracefully. A certain respectable dissenting minister used to draw crowded houses by announcing that he would preach at the age of more than 100. He corroborated his statement by a lively account of a battle in which he had won distinction in his youth. When the old gentleman died, aged 107, in the odour of sanctity, it appeared, by examining a register, that the battle had been fought before his birth. The evidence for such cases cannot be sufficiently weighed till a proper allowance has been deducted for enormous lying. When an old man's brain is growing gradually bewildered, it would be hard to grudge him the harmless gratification of spinning incredible yams. We should listen to him patiently, and assume him to have passed through adventures enough to fill several successive transmigrations. We need not be too in * credulous if he professes to have been at the storming of Quebec or the battle of Culloden; but we need not afterwards accept his statements as evidence of any-

thing but imaginative power. We believe, therefore, that the party in favour of human longevity have failed to establish their case. No instance has been produced at which it is quite impossible to cavil, and the gradual shrinking of the dimensions of such stores, as they advance into clear daylight from the mists of tradition, is a highly suspicious circumstance. We utterly disbelieve in Jenkins. We have our doubts even about that old Countess of Desmond, " who lived to the age of 110, and died by a fall from a cherry-tree then." Putting aside these extreme cases, it seems more probable that people may have sometimes overleapt the bound of the century by some three or four years. Cases have been produced in which the evidence for an age of 103 or 104 seems tolerably conclusive. Indeed, one venerable old lady appears to have convinced Sir George Lewis that she had succeeded, not only in living to 103, but in cracking nuts with her teeth afterwards. Her birth was recorded in the register of a neighbouring parish, and there seems to have been no reasonable ground for doubting her identity. Without giving in our adherence till more well-authenticated instances have been produced, we shall not be prepared to say, a priori, that any such claim was necessarily fictitious. It is a pity tha the experiment should not be tried. Philosophers have submitted to breed nests of disgusting insects in their own flesh, with a view to investigating their natural history. Devotees of science have submitted to martyrdoms in the shape of disease, discomfort, and torment of every kind. Why , should not some one, of a healthy constitution, place himself in the most favourable circumstances, and see how long he can manage to live ? It would, no doubt be rather dull, but the results obtained would be valuable. When we see the vitality that remains in men like Lord Brougham or our noble Premier, after all the wear and tear of exciting lives, we can hardly doubt that, if they had given their minds to it, they might have reached a fabulous length of years. Scientific men should endeavour to catch a young Lord Brougham; they should prevent him from over-exciting himself; they should keep him carefully out of Parliament and away from the Bar, and endeavour to concentrate his whole faculties upon the one object of continuing to exist. We believe that the life of such a mau might be to others what the prize turnip shown in pictorial advertisements is to the turnip of common life. Perhaps some of those half-crowns which are given to agricultural labourers for raising sixteen children without assistance from the parish might be diverted, in the interests of science, to a premium upon long lite. In course of time, we should possibly learn how to acquire a faculty which is often desired, though some people may think its advantage questionable.