I once knew an old man of about one hundred and four who retained many of his faculties. He could read ordinary print without glasses, walked firmly, rode well, and could even leap with some agility. When I last parted with him, I wished him twenty years more; upon which he grasped my hand closely, and declared he would not let me go until I had retracted or reversed the prayer.
Strolling with my venerable and esteemed colleague, Prof. Stephen Elliott, one afternoon, through a field on the banks of the river Ashley, we came upon a negro basking in the sun, the most ancient-looking personage I have ever seen. Our attempts, with his aid, to calculate his age, were of course conjectural; but we were satisfied that he was far above one hundred. Bald, toothless, nearly blind, bent almost horizontally, and scarcely capable of locomotion, he was absolutely alone in the world, living by permission upon a place, from which the generation to which his master and fellow-servants belonged had long since disappeared. He expressed many an earnest wish for death, and declared, emphatically, that he “was afraid God Almighty had forgotten him.”
We cannot wonder, then, that the ancients should believe, “Whom the gods love, die young,” and are ready to say with Southey, himself, subsequently, like poor Swift, a melancholy example of the truth of his poetical exclamation,
“They who reach Gray hairs die piecemeal.”
Sacred history informs us that, in the infancy of the world, the physiological tendency to death was far less urgently and early developed than it is now. When the change took place is not stated; if it occurred gradually, the downward progress has been long since arrested. All records make the journey of life from the time of Job and the early patriarchs, much the same as the pilgrim of to-day is destined to travel. Threescore and ten was, when Cheops built his pyramid, as it is now, a long life. Legends, antique and modern, do indeed tell us of tribes that, like Riley’s Arabs and the serfs of Middle Russia, and the Ashantees and other Africans, live two or three centuries, but these are travelers’ stories, unconfirmed. The various statistical tables that have been in modern times made up from materials more or less authentic, and the several inquiries into the general subject of longevity, seem to lead to the gratifying conclusion that there is rather an increase of the average or mean duration of civilized life. In 1806, Duvillard fixed the average duration of life in France at twenty-eight years; in 1846, Bousquet estimates it at thirty-three. Mallet calculated that the average life of the Genevese had extended ten years in three generations. In Farr’s fifth report (for 1844), the “probable duration,” the “expectation of life” in England, is placed above forty; a great improvement within half a century. It is curious, if it be true, that the extreme term seems to lessen as the average thus increases. Mallet is led to this opinion from the fact, among others, that in Geneva, coincident with the generally favorable change above mentioned, there has not been a single centenarian within twenty-seven years; such instances of longevity having been formerly no rarer there than elsewhere.