Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1886 — Longevity of the Ancients. [ARTICLE]

Longevity of the Ancients.

Gan a man reach or pass the age of a hun-Jred years? is a question discussed i. .. most interesting manner in a recent number of the Popular Science Monthly. Buffon was the first one m France to raise the question of the cxI" 1 ’’ )f human W. jn h’> mu, man, becoming adult at sixteen, ought to live to six times that age, cr to ninety-six years. Having been called ■ no: to account for the * m-no . ' .</-» attributed by the Bible r , • ti ia rolls, he risked the follow ing as an explanation; “Before the Hood the earm was less compact than it is nop . Tim la v of gravitation had acted for md. a little time; the productions of the globe had less consistency and the body of a man, being more supple, was more susceptible of extension, being able to grow for a longer time than now.” . The German Heusler has suggested on the same point that the ancients did not divide time as we do. Previous to the age of Abraham, the year among some people of the East was only three months, or a season; so that they had a year of spring, one of fall, one of winter. The year was extended so as to consi-d of tight months after Abraham, and of twelve months after Joseph. V oltaire rejected the longevity assigned to the patriarchs of the Bible, but accepted, with question, the stories of the great ages attained by some men in India, where, he says, “it is not rare to see old men of one hundred and twenty years.” The eminent French physiologist, Flourens, fixing the complete development of man at twenty years, teaches that he should live five times as long as it takes him to become an adult. According to this author, the moment of a completed development may be recognized by the fact of the junction of the bones with their apophyses. This junction takes place in horses at five years, and the horse does not live beyond twenty-live years; with the ox at four years, and it does not live over twenty years; with the cat at eighteen months, and that animal rarely lives over ten years. With man, it is effected at twenty years, and he only exceptionally lives beyond one hundred years. The same physiologist admits, however, that human life may be exceptionally prolonged under certain conditions of comfort, sobriety, freedom from care, regularity of habits, and observance of the rules of hygiene; and he terminates his interesting study of the last point with tiie aphorism, “Man kills himself rather than dies.”