WORLD'S OLDEST MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19061, 4 July 1925, Page 16 (Supplement)

WORLD'S OLDEST MAN.

ONE WHO SAW NAPOLEON. A man who claims to be 140 years old, and to be the only living person who saw Napoleon, was described to the Royal Geographical Society recently by Mr. H. St. J. B. Philby. former British representative in Transjordanta. The man's name is Hajj Tahir, and he states that lie was bom in Mecca, and went to Palestine at the age of 12 or 13, in 1799, when Napoleon was in Syria. He is sound enough in wind and limb," said Air. Philby, "and has an enormous appetite, and, strangest of ail, an indisputable power of mastication with the aid of what purports to be a, newly sprouting but still invisible third set of teeth. "The only serious weakness in his claim is that his offspring afford no relevant evidence of his age, as ho declares that he committed matrimony for the first, time at the age of 70 or thereabouts, and ho has recently married again." Mr. Philby added that, while Hajj Tahir claims to be 140 ho says that he was born in the year 1215 of the Mohammedan era, or 1801 A.D., which would make his age 124.