Geneva are now — as they ought to be—
among people aged between fifty and eighty.
These were the lusty men, from whom we
are said to be degenerated. The advantage
gained over the nineteenth by the sixteenth
century, was this: that if a man or woman
scraped on through filth, and epidemics and
exposure to the age of seventy, he or she
must have been very strong, and therefore
was more likely to wear, and did wear,
through another twenty years, more
frequently than is done among the men of
seventy in our day, who are men not
peculiarly strong, not picked veterans. In the
old days, it is even partly true that the men
who lived were more robust than we are,
because now delicate health is not sure
death; but then few who were weak escaped
an early death, as the high rate of mortality
in youth and childhood, and the low rate
of mortality after the age of forty, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, very well
testify.

For the abrupt and sudden diminution of
death among very young children, in the
nineteenth century, we are indebted to Jenner's
discovery of vaccination. Twenty-five in
twenty-six deaths, by small-pox, occur during
the first ten years. The gain in the nineteenth
century, of children under ten years old, as
compared with the century preceding, is
(according to the Geneva tables), that where
thirty-nine in a hundred used to be the
number of such children dying, there die now
but twenty-eight. A large proportion of this
gain is, as we have said, due to a single
medical discovery.

The average duration of life in Geneva, at
the end of the sixteenth century, was twenty-
one years and two months; in the seventeenth
century, it was twenty-five years and eight
months. In the first half of the eighteenth
century, the average length of life had risen
to thirty-two years and seven months; while,
in the next half century, improvement still
continuing, the average of life was thirty-four
years and six months. Between 1801 and
1813, the average still rose, and had become
thirty-eight years and six months. Between
1814 and 1833, the average length of life
became nearly forty-one years. Here the
tables stop; but there can be no doubt that
the improvement has continued. Thus we
see that by the amendment in house, food,
and habits, made during the last three
centuries, the average duration of life has become
absolutely doubled. What shall we think
now of the

"ancient uncorrupted times,
When tyrant custom bad not shackled Man,
But free to follow Nature was the mode."

Is it not by following the teaching of our
human nature, and by studying the ways of
Nature as she works without us, that we
have been led on, century by century, and
still are working on to better, higher things?
Free to follow Nature is the mode; and tied
to stand fast by those ancient times would be
the sorest shackle which a "tyrant custom"
could impose on Man.

NEWS OF AN OLD PLACE.

IF any friend of ours be sad and sorry, and
desire to improve the occasion by solemn
meditation on human life amidst vast rural
solitudes, we advise him to take a journey
by the Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to
Edinburgh. We have seen no tracts so
unpeopled since we emerged from the deserts
of Arabia. The banks of the Nile in Nubia,
the valleys of the Lebanon, the plain of
Damascus, are populous in comparison. There
is something very striking in being carried,
easily and rapidly, through that great district
of green hills, almost bare of trees, and quite
bare of houses for miles together. There is
something striking in seeing wide tracts of
oats, barley, and turnips spreading in the
levels, without discovering who can have
sown them, or who in the world is to reap
them. Here and there the angle of a house-
roof peeps out from behind the profile of a
hill. Now and then, when there is a long
vista into the mountains, a small dark island
is to be seen, far away amidst the ocean of
green— an oasis in this verdant desert, in
which are collected the little kirk and manse,
a farmstead, and half-a-dozen cottages, under
the cover of as many trees. Where people are
seen at work, awaiting the ripening of their
barley and oats, it is a rather piteous kind of
work. There is hay in nooks, and on any strip
otherwise useless; and such hay!— over-ripe,
long ago, yet never mellowed by true ripening
— with sour water standing in among the
clumps, and so many weeds, that the grass-
part can hardly be seen. In some of these
dank and dreary enclosures (one wonders
why they were ever enclosed), three or four
men are mowing (one wonders why in the
world they mow) their bog hay, rushes, and
ragwort, and all together, and tie up the crop
in sheaves, and set up the sheaves in shocks—
just as if they were the finest wheat grown in
the Lincolnshire beds. On the top of the
railway banks stand large cocks of this hay,
which looks like damp straw. The stranger
wonders what species of animal is to eat it.
If he inquire, he is told that it is a welcome
and needful resource for the sheep, in time of
snow-drifts. One is glad that the sheep have
something better to eat now. There they are,
clean from a late shearing, scattered over the
brown and purple fells, or thrusting
themselves into any hand's breadth of shade that
may be afforded by a broken sand-bank, or
any little quarry on the hill-side. There are
patches of vivid green among the purple
heather, where ewes and lambs are browsing
tranquilly to-day, without a thought of the
snow-drifts which, six months hence, will