CENTENARIANS.
IT does not appear quite easy to be a centenarian. Sir 0- Cornewall Lewis no doubt was rash in assuming it to be impossible, and Mr. Thom, the Librarian to the House of Lords, who, after exhausting investigation, pronounced such cases to be excessively rare, was probably the victim of a pre- conceived idea ; but even Mr. T. E. Young, the very newest authority, the late President of the Institute of Actuaries, is evidently inclined to think that the normal life of the healthiest and most enduring persons is considerably less than a century. The general conclusion of his very interesting and instructive, though rather overloaded, book upon the subject is that the instances of abnormal longevity, which, however, do occur, are, so to speak, sports, or aberrations, which are probably, though not certainly, brought at the other end within the great Law of Averages by the deaths of unborn children during the period of gestation. The length of the potential life cannot, it is tree, be proved, for there is no absolute reason either in theory or in science why life should ever end, any more than there is why a man should not be twelve feet high; but universal experience, or, as it is sometimes called, the "rule of frequency," is sufficient evidence. Human life, Mr. Young moreover thinks, ends even in aberrant cases very close to the century. The longest life of which there is proof that would satisfy an insurance office does not exceed one hundred and six years. The dura- tion of patriarchal life asserted in Scripture, however the statement may be explained, cannot refer to indiridnal life, and the cases so often quoted of Jenkins, Parr, Cornaro, and others remain entirely without verification. They are sometimes frauds, sometimes blunders, and some- times merely instances of ignorant credulity. The number even of centenarians is exceedingly few. The inquiries of the Institute of Actuaries and the Faculty of Actuaries, together with those of the Actuary of the National Debt Office, cover more than eight hundred thousand lives, and among them only twenty-two indisputable cases of life prptracted beyond the century can be discovered, of whom four were males and eighteen females. These, it will be observed, were all picked lives, persons either accepted by the offices because they were likely to live, or persons with comparatively good means who had unusual confidence in their own chances of survival, and therefore bought annuities. (Mr. Young, indeed, makes the exceedingly acute suggestion that people really know a good deal about their own consti- tutions, and that consequently the self-selection of annuitants by themselves impairs the accuracy of many calculations.) It follows that even among such persons the chance of any one reaching a hundred is only about one in fifty thousand, while as the assured, especially among women, have usually surmounted the great dangers of life, the chance of any one taken indiscriminately from the population is almost indefinitely less. The custom of humanity is therefore against any one who wishes to be a centenarian, while apparently his own action will help him very little, the conditions of longevity being in great measure involuntary. Moderation in flesh-eating, it is true, and in the drinking of alcohol conduces to lengthened life, and so does a placid temperament, which, however, must not, we suspect, be artificial, as perpetual self-restraint exhausts vital energy ; but the three main conditions were settled before the aspirant was born. He should be of spare habit, which is constitu- tional ; he should be of medium height, over which, as Scripture tells us, he has no control ; and he should be born in one of those families the members of which have a general habit of living to eighty-five or ninety. This is much the most important requisite of all, and it is not quite established that it is not a universal one. Whence the quality is derived is not yet understood, but it is beyond question that there exists in some fatuities a quality as separate as any race peculiarity which enables a majority of its members to go on living 1.eyond the average period. They are not physically stronger than other people, and they are as often attacked by disease, but they have a power of recovering themselves completely after ill nes4 which other men do not possess. and they con- s qu.ntly decay more slowly. It is probable, though not certain, indeed, that this peculiarity extends to whole races.
and that the greater average duration of Western as compared with Eastern life is derived from it. The Asiatic, that is, who is never attacked by severe illness lives as long as the European, but if he is attacked he has an inferior faculty of recuperation. He does not recover so completely, or he dies at once. It should be added that for those wishing to be centenarians it is convenient to be born a woman, for the present popular notion, which Mr. Young shows to be com- paratively new, that old ladies tend to live longer than old men, is absolutely true, so true as to affect the tables of all life insurance societies. More of them pass the hundredth year, and they pass it by a longer period of time, though at last the oil burns out in the lamp in both sexes. (This burn- ing out of the oil is, by the way, one of the best arguments for the usually illogical belief of the materialists. It suggests that a man may have at birth a certain quantity of the essence called life, commonly supposed to be immaterial or spiritual, and that when this is used up he ceases as a living being to exist.)
Will the total number of centenarians increase ? The answer must almost certainly be in the affirmative, at least as regards the comfortable classes. They tend, as every one can see for themselves, to live longer. There is considerable evidence that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries men of seventy were considered very aged, and that a man of eighty was a rare phenomenon; and of course the number of the exceptionally old increases with the number of the aged. There is no increase, or an imperceptible one, in the degree of the exception, but there is in the number of exceptions, a fact observable in another department of physics. The ancient world produced a few men as tall as modern giants—the Emperor Maximin, for example—but it seems certain that the proportion of six-footers, and, indeed, the general bulk, has enormously increased. The Roman soldiery were small, lithe men, and there does not exist in England a set of suits of Middle Age armour which the larger Guardsmen of our day could by any device or exertion put on for battle. There will, therefore, if medical science, sanitation, and the general habit of obedience to the laws of health continue to improve, be mauy more centenarians,— possibly, Mr. Young hints, so many as to make the sale of annuities based upon existing tables of longevity a very risky speculation. Whether that fact will increase either the wisdom or the happiness of the world is a more doubtful matter. There is no particular happiness to be gained from long life unless it is also healthy life, and to declare that it will be healthy life requires more data than we possess. There is no doubt whatever that health between sixty-five and seventy-five has during this century been won- derfully improved, but after that age the evidence is as yet defective. Exceeding age, moreover, it must not be forgotten, will always involve survival beyond the average of people,— that is, a long space of lonely time in which all one's friends and most of one's relatives have by degrees passed away. That is not a prospect tending to happiness, even if we lay no stress on the fact, now beginning to be very marked, that the increased habit of longevity stops the flow of promotion, and therefore impedes the happiness of the general body of the young. As to any increase of wisdom from the increase of longevity, that is at least as much a tradition as a fact capable of proof. The earlier world attached enormous import- ance to the judgment of old age, partly because the young knew little and were in consequence silly, but chiefly because in the absence or scarcity of recorded facts or reflections the invaluable instruction of experience could belong only to the comparatively old. True knowledge was bottled up in persons. Now it is recorded, one gathers it from printed narratives, and, as a young lady once remarked in the writer's hearing, "a good deal of experience nowadays is intuitive." Although, there- fore, the centenarian of to-day may know more than the man of fifty—indeed, if his faculties are equally good, meat know more—his knowledge need not be doable that of his rivals in total volume. Taking all the facts together, we think men may be contented that the multiplication of centenarians, though it will go on at an increasing pace, is, and will remain, exceedingly slow. They will be subjects of wondering observation for some time yet, and when they cease to be it is doubtful if they will be a very happy or very useful section of mankind. The nonagenarians will have the best of it, and the octogenarians will be happier than they.
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