impression made by the things which took place
six months before and six months after our birth,
that we forget the grand chronological distinction
between the two. Thus we trace and follow
back ancient history in our thoughts, almost as
if it formed a portion of our own memoirs.
We rarely call to mind that we were absolute
nonentities, perfect instances of annihilation—if
that can be annihilated which has never existed—
that we were buried in the depths of nothingness,
at the time when Julius Cæsar fought the naked
Picts, when the founders of Rome seized their
Sabine brides, when Noah descended from the
ark, when Adam was driven from his beloved
Paradise. Nay, further; when we rise from the
perusal of astronomical or geological works,
imagination easily carries us back to a still
higher antiquity. Because we are living now
and dwelling on the earth, we have an instinctive
feeling that our own personal history is not
utterly disconnected with, that there is no wide
impassable abyss separating our biography from,
the pre-Adamite days when monstrous reptiles
floundered in seas of mud, from the ages when
our planet emerged out of chaotic confusion
into orderly regularity, or even from that
primeval morn when stars and suns obeyed the
fiat, "Let there be light!" Short-lived as man
may be in bodily organisation, his intellectual
range may be made to comprise the whole
duration of past time.

And yet man's earthly life might be considerably
less brief than it is, if he would only consent
to the self-denial needful to make it longer,
by joining M. Flourens's proselytes, who, it is
said, have got up a Société de Longue Vie, or
Long-lived Club, on somewhat more rational
principles than those of Cardan. His theory
(Cardan's) was, that trees live longer than
animals for no other reason than that they take no
exercise. Exercise increases perspiration, and
perspiration shortens life; it follows that,
to live long, you must never budge an inch.
It is a justification of the economical traveller,
who, when urged to walk a little faster,
pleaded that he could not afford to sweat.
We ought not to visit Cardan's fancy with
extreme severity; but it is not so easy to
excuse Lord Bacon, the father of experimental
philosophy, for advocating the same idea, and
prescribing oily unguents for the purpose of
hindering perspiration. Maupertuis wanted
other people—not himself—to cover their bodies
with a coat of pitch, mummyfying themselves
during their lifetime. Voltaire had the audacity
to turn Maupertuis into ridicule.

The truth is, that unless the wear and tear of
life is extraordinarily severe and unremitting,
men rust up faster than they wear up. In this
consists the horrible punishment of solitary
confinement, with nothing to do. The mind,
searching in vain for something to act upon,
corrodes itself. It is the practical application
of the metaphor of eating one's own heart.
Still, there are animal men, of a sleepy, inert
disposition, who are content just to open their
eyelids, the window-shutters of their soul, and
to allow the image of the opposite side of the
street, and of any passing stranger, to stream
in, as if their eyes and their brain were gifted
with no more animation than the lens and the
paper of a camera obscura. Nevertheless, in
the long run, they are often made to pay dearly
for their unhuman sloth and unimpressionability.
As they imitate the life, so they follow
the fate, and they share the destiny, of the
stalled ox and the fatted pig. Their animal
organism does its duty; but their intellectual
organism not doing its, the involuntary system
of the mammal creature, Homo sapiens, gets
the mastery of the voluntary; blood and fat
triumph over nerve and brain, and the domestic
biped is felled by apoplexy, inflammation, or
dropsy, as surely as if he had been led to the
butchery; with the difference that a domestic
quadruped is useful after its death, whereas he, the
do-nothing and think-nothing, is, when slaughtered,
only an encumbrance and a nuisance, causing
considerable trouble and expense to get rid of.

M. Flourens's model of longevity, his show old
man, is Luigi Cornaro, a famous centenarian who
died in fifteen hundred and sixty-six, and whose
book, composed of four successive discourses, is
a continued eulogy of sobriety. Born with a
feeble constitution, and living in the most
gluttonous times of Italy (excepting always the
Roman emperors), his health broke down under
the fashionable excesses of the day. When he
had reached the age of thirty-five, his medical
men told him he had only a couple more years to
live. This serious warning was seriously attended
to. Cornaro discarded his evil habits; regularity
took the place of dissipation, and frugality of
temperance. His abstinence, which has become
celebrated, was almost carried to excess. Twelve
ounces of solid food and fourteen ounces of (not
port) wine, was all his daily sustenance for more
than half a century. This regimen answered so
well that, during the whole of that time, he was
never ill but once, and that was when his friends
persuaded him to increase his allowance to
fourteen ounces of food and sixteen ounces of
wine. A week's indulgence in the more liberal
diet brought on, first, ill-humour, melancholy, and
angry tempers, ending on the twelfth day in a
furious colic, which lasted four-and-twenty hours
and nearly cost him his life.

Conaro's book offers an example of the way in
which the duration of life may be influenced by
sensible management. He was a confirmation of
the proverb that, at forty (or before), every man
is either a fool or a physician. He imposed on
himself this rigid temperance only because he
found that it suited his constitution. He did
not insist upon other people's following exactly
the same rule; he had too much good sense for
that. "I eat very little," he says, " because my
stomach is delicate; and I abstain from certain
dishes, because they do not agree with me.
Individuals with whom they do agree are not
obliged to deprive themselves of them; to
partake of such is quite allowable. But they should
abstain from eating too much even of what does
agree with their stomachs."