The Ancestry of the Long-Lived

The problem of long life has intrigued the imagination of man at all times and the tradition of a much longer span of life in the spacious days of the distant past than what the modern man enjoys survives among all nations. Among the Hindus the 1 Puranas' set forth that it was a slur on the administration of a ruler if his subjects failed to attain the age of a hundred and twenty. Isaiah states his ideal, ' there shall be no more thence an infant of days nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old'. The investigation of the duration of human life has attained a position of acknowledged importance in every civilized community. There is perhaps nothing so uncertain as a prediction about the probable length of life of an individual but, as Babbage has put it, ' few