LONG LIFE. Methods by Which You May Tell Whether You Are Likely to Have It.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 189, 29 January 1887, Page 2

LONG LIFE. Methods by Which You May Tell Whether You Are Likely to Have It.

If any one would know whether he is likely to live long or die Boon, let him inquire whether old age runs in his family or not, for the good tissues of long life are apt to be hereditary, and he may commit a great many excesses or other errors without killing himself if he comes of a long-lived stock. In like manner he may get much help toward a knowledge of the disease to which he is prone, and which excesses or other errors are likely to light up, by inquiring what diseases his forefathers or kinsmen suffered or died from. Some diseases are notoriously reckoned to be directly hereditary in like kind, for example, epilepsy, phthisis, and insanity. When a person has one of them we are not surprised to learn that the discovery is a sufficient explanation and to think that no more need be said. But it is not really an explanation ; it is merely an indication ot the direction in which the exact explanation has yet to be sought. If it be a sufficient explanation how does it happen that all the children of the same* unsound father and mother do not suffer the same way 1 How ig it that twins, living under the same conditions, Have not always, as now and then they have, the same diseases at the same ages ? In calling a disease Hereditary it is not really meant that the disease itself is actually inherited by the offspring, who, in that case, would be born with it ; what is meant is that the latter inherits a certain organic constitution which, being likely to undergo that pathological development in the ordinary circumstances of life, is therefore described as a constitutional predisposition or tendency to the disease. We do not in the least know what is the intimate nature of the predisposition, but we know that it may begruater or less in different persons, and that it is thought to be so great in the cases of the diseases mentioned and so likely to be transmitted to children as to be a seriou3 objection, if not an actual bar, to marriage. Those who, having fallen in love, are aware of the existence of them in their families are therefore not a little troubled sometimes with scruples of conscience and anxiously ask medical advice whether they ehall marry or not. In the end they commonly marry, whatever the advice given them, having persuaded themselves that the epilepsy was not real epilepsy, but a form of violent hy&teria ; that the lung mischief v?as not constitutional phthisis, but the accidental consequence of a neglected cold, that the insanity was not the outcome of family degeneracy, but an acci dental blow on the head which was thought nothing of at the time. Would the earth ever have been peopled had cool reason been potent enough to quench the hot passion of love ?— " Fortnightly Bavipw."