Current Topics.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 6, 7 February 1901, Page 1

Current Topics.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once sagely remarked that every one who lives long enough catches old age. One Angus McDonald, a late Canterbury (N.Z.) resident, apparently caught a good supply of it before he resigned His faded form To waste and worm a few days ago. A Press Association telegram in last Saturday's daily papers runs as follows: ' Angus McDonald, an old shepherd, died to-day at the age of 105 years.' The brief message which tells of the passing of the ancient Scottish shepherd reminds us that during the past twelve months the N.Z. Tablet has recorded the deaths of quite a considerable group of persons whose years passed five score. Among the number were the following : One Kennealy — the youngest of thirteen children — who passed away at Royton (near Oldham, England) at the ripe age of no years; Henry McCloskey, an Antrim man, who had sufficient stamen vitcc to tramp two and a half miles some months ago to secure his voting paper ; G. Ryan, who died at Ballyhannis, near Cashel, after having seen the storm and sunshine of 112 years ; Mrs. Brigid R. Riordan, who went Beyond at the age of no — and of whom our correspondent wrote: 'As she neither smoked tobacco nor drank spirituous liquors, her doctors were at a loss to account for her early death '; Michael O'Shea, whose soul and body recently dissolved a partnership that had lasted 106 years ; John Obispo, a Catholic Indian, of Huaxteca, Mexico, whose birth is set down in the parish register in the year 1770, and whose death took place when he was 130 years old ; Patrick Hayes, who saw the French fleet in Bantry Bay in 1796, and whose days were cut short at Cardiff after he had seen 109 winters and summers. In a recent issue we gave particulars of three other centenarians who within the past few months were said to be still living at the same great South Welsh port.

HOW LONG ?

Buffon, Haller, Hufeland, and Heller, basing their theory on the analogy of brute creation, stoutly maintain that, barring accidents, every Jack and Jill of our race should approach or touch the fifth score of summers before making their final tumble down the sloping hill of life. Buffon's calculation was based on the proportion which duration of life bears, in all animals, to duration of years of growth. ' A dog attains full growth in two years, which he can multiply by five or six in his term of life. The horse, full grown at four years, can live six or seven times as long— i.e., twenty-five or twenty-six years. On the same principle,' argues Buffon, ' man, fourteen years in growing, can live six or seven times that term, or to ninety or a hundred years.' The later theory is that an animal lives five times as long as it grows. But different kinds of beasts vary SO much in this respect that no absolute rule can be laid down. The raven, the grey parrot, the eagle, and certain other feathered bipeds are probably hors concours in the longevity contest with the bipeds that are featherless. ' Ordinarily speaking/ says one authority on the subject, ' a man requires fully twenty-five years to attain his complete growth and full development. Therefore, by all the laws of analogy, he should

CONCERNING CENTENARIANS.

— barring accidents — retain within his mortal frame the ' vital spark of heavenly flame ' for about 125 years. So say your physiologist and naturalist. ' Almost all those kinds of deaths,' they maintain, ' which take place before the hundredth year are brought on artificially-— that is, by disease or accident. And it is certain/ they add, ' that the far greater number of men die an unnatural death, and that not above one in three thousand attains an age of over a hundred years.'

A writer in Health pointed out last year that 'within the past sixty years the average of life in Great Britain has been increased by about ten years.' This prolongation of vital energy is due to better ventilation, improved sanitation, and the use of more wholesome food. Theorists may theorise till their hair falls off and their eyes grow dim. But the royal Psalmist's ordinary limit of life duration — three score and ten — still holds good despite the plumber and the bacteriologist. Few nowadays — says Oliver Wendell Holmes — climb the white summit of the Mont Blanc of even four score. At sixty, men come within range of the rifle-pits, and at sixty-three, at the beginning of the grand climacteric, nature begins to administer her kindly anodyne. ' More and more freely,' adds Holmes, 'she gives it, as the years go on, to her children, until, if they last long enough, every faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its benign inffuence.' Chesterfield expresses the same thought in a different way. In 1765 — eight years before his death— he wrote :' I feel a gradual decay, though a gentle one ; and I think I shall not tumble, but slide gently, to the bottom of the hill of life. When that will be I neither know nor care, for lam very weary.' Nowadays the downhill slope is smoothed and sand-papered by the newspaper, pebble lenses, slippers, easy-chairs, the ' divine weed,' and artificial grinders. Barzillai knew none of them ; the Countess of Desmond and Old Parr very few. Their last long toboggan must have been a bit comfortless and monotonous.

MORE CENTENARIANS.

A dash of romance and of marvel surround, as with a halo, the study of longevity. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, asks : ' Longa dies igitur quid contulit?' (What is the use of a long life ? ) When old Mary Campbell was asked by Sir John Sinclair if she desired to live longer, she exclaimed with right good heartiness: 'Not an hour! not an hour!' But the usual experience is that people cling to dear life like an Anglo-Saxon to an Irish jaunting car or a Member of our House of Representatives to a seat which is equally insecure. Says Dryden :—: — Strange cozenage ! None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. Hence the efforts of alchemist and physician to lengthen life's day. Bacon fancied he found the elixir of life in a salmagundi of gold, coral, vipers, rosemary, lignum aloes, ' the bone of a stag's heart,' and some other rare and valuable ' properties.' Lord Verulam sought it in liquid gold, or 'golden oyle'; others in a diet of pullets fattened on vipers, and in philters and charms to scare off death or crack the blade of his scythe. And in 15 13 the aged warrior Ponce de Leon

fitted out an expedition at his own cost to search amidst the wilds of Florida for the fountain of perpetual youth. His days were cut short by the impact of an Indian arrow, and the fountain still remains undiscovered. We are still seeking the secret of length of days ; some in the elixirs or cure-alls of charlatans as brazen-faced as Arnoldus de Villa, Eugenius Philateles, or Thomas Vaughan ; others in the retort and the bacteriological laboratory. The judge from the literature of the rubJT^ strange fasrination seems to surround even the study of cases of great longevity. When Sir G. Cornwall Lewis was canvassing Herefordshire in 1852 hp was up to the eyebrows in an inquiry into the truth of alleged cases of centenarianism. On one occasion a Tory voter hotly declined to support his candidature. Sir George was undisturbed, and placidly replied : ' I'm very sorry you can't give me your vote ; but perhaps you can tell me whether any person has died in your parish at an extraordinary age.' Sir George was one of the writers in Notes and Queries who did much in the way ot ' stablishing truth and startling error ' by sifting many alleged cases of romantic centenarianism out of the realm of veracious history.

Some cases of alleged centenarianism are patent absurdities. Others are improbable or difficult of verification. Still others have been proved to be untrue. And a considerable number have been placed beyond the reach of all doubt. It would require — as someone said — an ostrich's stomach to digest the story of the fabulous number of years claimed by Astephius and by a withered old sheik who lived at Smyrna early in the nineteenth century. Like the Irish jarvey, those ancient romancists had too much regard for truth 'to be draggin' her out on every palthry occasion.' There is a forbidding air of improbability about the story of the South Carolina centenarian who caught measles at the age of 99; about that of one Mary Costello's 125 year old grandmother who had to be rocked in a cradle when she got far into the sere and yellow leaf ; and about the tale which tells how John Weeks — who is said to have lived 114 years — celebrated his tenth marriage, in his 106 th year, with a blushing maiden of sweet sixteen. It is clearly impossible to verify at this distant date the following statement of Pliny : 'The year of our Lord 76 is memorable, for in that year there was a census from which it appears that in the part of Italy lying between the Appennines and the River Po there were found filty-four 103 years old; fifty-seven no years old; two 120 years, four 130 years ; four 135 years; and three 140 years each.' 'In the eighteenth century,' says Mulhall, ' Sejoncourt published a list of fort>-nine persons who had died between the ages of 130 and 175 years.' This is one of the statements regarding centenarians which one feels disposed to take with a peck of salt. In the matter of age as well as of personal virtue, tombstones have been known to lie above regarding those who lie beneath. One at Cla\e Prior, Worcestershire, credits a rude forefather of the hamlet with an age of 309 years. But the historian empties all the romance out of the inscription with the following explanation ' The village chiseller, hazy about numeration, wished to score 39, and engraved 30 first and 9 afterwards.' At St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, a wag, by altering a 1 to a 2 upon a tombstone, credited a buried worthy with an age of 200 years. It is just possible that the unwarranted addition of the figure 1 may account for the patriarchal age — 146 years — attributed to Peter Borlan by a gravestone in the cemetery of Sligo Abbey. Somebody has said that when a woman is past go she is proud of her age. One Miss Mary Bilinge, an aged English dame, laid claim to have weathered 112 }ears. But a keen-scented investigator reduced her tally to the relatively mere ' lusty winter, frosty but kindly,' of 91. A famous Cornish grandame, Dolly Pentreath, had her claim of 102 years docked by at least eleven years. And a goodly percentage of reputed cases of centenarianism rest upon nothing more substantial than mere guesswork or the hollow-sounding shell of common hearsay.

GOING TO EXTREMES.

The number of genuine cases of centenarianism is very great. There are a few stock names in this connection that cannot be passed over. The two most notable wellestablished cases of ultra-longevity are those of the Countess of Desmond and Old Parr. A good deal of romance has been spun like a fuz/y cocoon about those two animated mummies ; but, even allowing for a reasonable margin of exaggeration, there can be no well-grounded doubt as to their great age. The Countess (Kathenne Fitzgerald) was an Irishwoman. She is credited with having been 20 years old at the time of Bosworth Field in 1485. Sir Walter Raleigh—who, by the way introduced the ' divine weed ' (tobacco) and the potato into Ireland — knew her in 1589, when she was supposed to be in her 124 th year, and Fynes Morrison, the traveller, speaks of her as being alive, if not particularly lively, during his visit to Ireland in the years 1599 to 1603. Bacon, in his Natural History, says that the aged Irish dame cut a new set of teeth in her old age, and sundry writers in the Second Series (vol. vii) of Notes and Queries and in the Quarterly Review for

March, 1853 (all of which are before us), pretty conclusively settle the question that she lived to the extraordinary age of 140 years. The manner of death of this giddy old centenarian is thus described by a modern humorist, who said That she lived to much more than a hundred and ten, And died from a fall from a cherry tree then. Old Thomas Parr was a contemporary of the Countess of Desmond. He was born at Alberbury, Salop (England), in 14.83 ; married at Rn, and again at 120; and was brought to Court and kept there as a natural curiosity by Charles I. But Old Tom misled his cheese and onions and hairy bacon and dose of milk or whey or ale, and died prematurely in 1635, at the respectable age of 152 years. Parr, by the way, was not the only centenarian Lothario who led a bride to the altar. A case is recorded in the Greenwich register of 1685 °f one Thomas Cooper, aged 108, who wedded a wellseasoned spinster of 80. Two centenarians were married within recent years in the United States— the one (William Sexton, aged 108) at Knoxville, Tennessee, on New Year's Day, 1897 ; the other (John Clews, 102) at Franklin, Pennsylvania, in the following year. • * •

At least two Anglican clergymen are numbered among the gaunt company of centenarians : Rev. Peter Alley, who died at Dunamony, Ireland, in 1763, at the age of m years, and Rev. W. Davis, incumbent of Staunton-on-Wye, England, who flitted Beyond in 1790 after having spent 105 years in this ' wale of tears.' Which reminds us that Father Sebastiano Gigli, parish priest of Monastero di Ombrone, in Italy, is hale and hearty and 101, reads without spectacles, and still faithfully discharges all the duties of his sacred ministry. ' Lady' Lewson, an eccentric old widow, died in London in 1806 at the ripe age of 106. A curious interest attaches to the undoubted case of Miss Elizabeth Grey, which is mentioned in the first volume of Chambers' Book of Days (p. 463). She was born in May, 1748, and died in Edinburgh on April 2, 1856, aged 108 years. ' She survived her father one hundred years, and, stranger still, was buried beside a half-brother who had been dead 128 years.' One of the few odd millions of John Smiths is recorded to have died on the north-west coast of Tasmania last year at the ripe age of no. One Peggy McQuaid died in 1896 near Enniskillen after a life that had dragged its slow length through 106 years. Her husband died in 1894 at the age of 104. The Fort Myers Press credits John Gomez with an age of 122 years. An American exchange records how James Cavanagh, of Watertown, New York, celebrated his 109 th birthday on Christmas Day, 1899. And another American paper on our exchange list claims for Noah Raby, of the Piscatawna Township Poorhouse, the distinction of being 'the oldest man alive.' His age is given as 129. Dr. Charles Smith, an American physician, pushes Raby tolerably closely, it, as is asserted on what is termed 'evidence of the most unimpeachable character,' his jears number 125. In MulhalPs Dictionary of Statistics (pp. 356,357) we find the following 1 : ' Among centenarians of recent date were Mrs. Anne Butler, daughter of Admiral Winn, died at Portsmouth, January, 1883, aged 103 years; and Mrs. Betty Lloyd, at Ruabon, Wales, March, 1883, aged 107.' Mulhall then adds: ' According to Dr. Farr's tables, of one million male and female persons born, 77 males and 147 females will reach 100 years; but the newer tables of Dr. Ogle give only 41 males and 112 females.' ' Levasseur,' says the late distinguished statistician, 'gives a table of 1474 centenarians in twenty years ending 1884, from which it appears that 28 men and 46 women die yearly over 100 years of age.' The figures of the English census of 1 89 1 show that out of 66 persons who were 100 years old and upwards 43 were women and only 23 of the sex that is variously termed ' stronger ' and ' sterner.' Thus it seems, after all, that the ' weaker ' sex is made of tougher fibre than the lord of creation. Our list of Irish centenarians is a very lengthy one. And Ireland, Spain, and France furnish the highest number of persons of 100 years old and upwards. The Journal des Debats (quoted by Mulhall) published in November, 1898, the following statement of centenarians then known to be living in Europe: Ireland, 578; Spain, 401 ; France, 243; England, 146 ; Germany, 75 ; Scotland, 46.

WHAT IS THE SECRET?

What is the secret of great length of days ? Alack, the ' doctors ' differ hopelessly. Porridge, says one. Regularity of diet and exercise, say others. Others still place attention to personal and domestic hygiene in the forefront of causes of longevity. And from the a thousand mouths comes the cry : Temperance. But Macklin, the centenarian actor ' never ate or drank at set times, but as inclination or appetite prompted.' Of the centenarian Rev. Peter Alley it is written : • For the last thirty-five years of his life he took little in -door, and no out-door, exercise. He lived well and fed heartilyJ taking buttered rolls for breakfast, and hot roast meat foi' supper.' In the second volume of his Code of Health and Longevity Sir John Sinclair cites the example of 'a harddrinking smuggler ' and 'a soaking, fox-hunting squire' who

lived to the age of a hundred years and more. We knew in Victoria an ex-convict who lived past his 102 nd birthday, and who boasted that he seldom went to bed sober when he could find the means of rolling in ' seas over.' But, in Sinclair's words, it is but fair to add that 'the probabilities are four to one in favor of sobriety.' Old Parr, according to Taylor, the water-poet, never smoked tobacco. But among the centenarians who were inveterate worshippers of the weed were Abraham Favrot, who lived to be 104; Jane Garbutt, a Yorkshire dame, who died in 1856, aged no; and one Hein<-j c h Har'7 who • went off ' at Hildhausen, in Silesia, with— it is said— the burden of 142 year-, upon him. So, at least, aay* Chalto, in his curious Paper of Tobacco. As to hygiene : • Lady ' Lewis, as we have said above, saw 106 years. But both in her house and person she was a deadly foe to cleanliness. Her rooms were seldom even swept. They were never washed. And ' people who wash themselves,' said she, ' are always catching cold. What, then, is the secret? We ' give it up ' with this parting quotation, which contains a few grains at least of wisdom : 'More than anything else, probably, "a certain bodily and mental pre-disposition to longevity," signs of which may be summed up in the metis sana in corpore sano, in a sanguine temperament with a little of the phlegmatic, and in a strong natural power of restoration and of healing. Of course this predisposition depends for fulfilment on various circumstances : a tranquil life ; an absence from irritability, or provocation to it ; a contentment arising out of easy slumbers and " accounts with God and man daily squared up "; and a cheerfulness engendered by the society of the young.' But— in summa— good living is, we ween, of more account than long living. And it is well for both young and old to ever remember that «no man hveth to himself.'