out a third, which, although not noticed by
physiologists, is not the less real. This
development consists of the deep and internal change
which is worked in the very innermost tissue of
our organs, and which, by rendering all these
parts more finished and firm, also renders their
functions more certain and the entire organism
more complete. This last process of nature,
which he calls the work of invigoration, goes
on, more or less, as far as sixty-five or seventy.
At seventy begins the first old age, which
reaches up to eighty-five. In youth the individual
is possessed of a reserve fund of strength;
it is the gradual diminution of this disposable
fund which constitutes the physiological
character of old age. So long as an old man only
employs his ordinary strength for ordinary
purposes, he is not aware that he has lost anything;
but the instant that he oversteps the boundary
of his usual acting forces, he feels fatigued,
exhausted; he finds that he has no longer the
hidden resources, the reserved and superabundant
energies of youth.

At eighty-five begins the second and last old
age, with something like two centuries for its
extreme limit. The majority of mankind die of
disease or accident; very few die of old age
properly so called. Man has adopted an artificial
kind of life, in which his mind is more frequently
indisposed than his body, and in which his
corporeal frame is more frequently out of sorts than
it would be were it regulated by habits more
calm, more constantly and more judiciously
laborious. Haller believes that man ought to be
classed amongst the longest-lived animals, and
that our complaints about the shortness of life
are very unjust, when it may attain to nearly
two hundred years. He collected a great many
examples of long life, and records six instances
of people's dying at a hundred and forty to a
hundred and fifty years of age. His extreme
examples are one of a hundred and fifty-two, and
another of a hundred and sixty-nine. The first of
these cannot be called in doubt, being supported
by the testimony of the illustrious Harvey. Thomas
Parr, of the county of Shropshire, on the borders
of Wales, having become famous on account of his
great age, Charles the First desired to see him.
He was brought to court with kind intentions,
but with an unkind result; they gave the old
man too much to eat. He died of indigestion.
Harvey dissected him. All his viscera were
in perfect health; the cartilages of his ribs
were not ossified. He might have lived for
several years longer. He met with an accidental
death.

The difficulty of marking the transition from
one of these ages to the next, consists in there
being no resting point or halting place between
one age and another. Life is an insensible but
continual progress. You watch a plant and cannot
see it grow; but if you leave it till next day,
you will see that it has grown. Life is a river
which always streams in one direction without
the slightest reflux. Our years flow on, as wave
follows wave. You cannot cast anchor in the
river of life. To float on its surface as long as
possible but few and simple rules need be
observed. First, you must make up your mind to
old age, and take it as it comes, sensibly,
patiently, and gracefully. Secondly, you must
thoroughly know yourself; you ought to have
nothing to learn respecting your own bodily and
mental peculiarities. Both these precepts are
philosophical quite as much as medical, and are
not the less valuable on that account. Thirdly,
take care to acquire a prudent set of daily habits.
Health, in fact, is nothing else than a combination
of good physical habits, just as happiness is a
combination of good moral habits. Old men who
do the same things every day, with the same
moderation, and the same zest, appetite, and pleasure,
live for ever . "The grand miracle, to me," said
Voltaire, "is that I exist." And if foolish vanity,
which never grows old, had not driven him to
Paris at eighty-four, his "miracle," might have
lasted a century, as Fontenelle's had done.
Fourthly, attack every complaint the moment that
it declares itself. In youth, life is, as it were,
lined and strengthened with a double coat of
vitality; in old age the web is single, threadbare
in places, and liable to be rent by the first rough
contact. Therefore must we watch to ward off
the threatened blow. With these four theoretical
rules, and the practical counsel to be
deduced from them touching diet, exercise,
temperature, and the rest of it, how long may a man
expect to live? He will not live for more
than his life, but he will live for the whole
of his life; that is to say, he will enjoy the
whole of the term allowed by his own particular
constitution as an individual, in combination
with the general laws of the constitution of
the species.

         OCCASIONAL REGISTER.
                        WANTED

A MEANS of gently withdrawing Lord
Lyndhurst's attention from the merits of a
Grand Jury in theory, to the defects of a Grand
Jury in practice. Also, an expression of thanks
to Lord Overstone for having strikingly
exemplified the uselessness of the system which
Grand Jurors are now compelled to administer,
by quoting his own former experience of it—
when he and his fellow-jurors were obliged, at a
single session, to pledge their oaths to the truth
of more than four hundred indictments, without
having had an opportunity of previously
examining them.

BY THE REVEREND GENTLEMAN who
took upon himself to write to The
Times, proclaiming (quite erroneously) a
certain living person to be the author of a certain
anonymous work of genius, Any Excuse, be it
ever so small, for that impertinence.

A SMART DRAMATIC AUTHOR, to
whom constant employment is offered.
His duty will be to watch the publication of
serial stories, and, when they have reached the