[35] The American Indian, p. 177.
[36] Among the Eskimos of Labrador, p. 111.
[37] “Old Age and Death,” Am. Jour. Psychol., October, 1896.
[38] With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa, p. 157.
[39] Savage Man in Central Africa, p. 176.
[40] The Life of a South-African Tribe, p. 131.
[41] “Physiological and Medical Observations on the Indians of Southwest United States and Mexico,” Bureau Amer. Ethnol., Bull. 34.
[42] Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde, Chap. 74.
[43] On Centenarians and the Duration of the Human Race, 1899.
[44] A few even recent writers have gone to the extreme of doubting the authenticity of every record of human life beyond a century, although Young seems to have demonstrated it in his twenty-two annuitants. All such contentions are only doctrinnaire. Lives exceptionally prolonged may be abnormal, like dwarfs and giants, and extreme skepticism here has hardly more justification than extreme credulity. In 1799 James Easton believed he had demonstrated that 712 persons between the years A.D. 66 and the above date had attained a century or upward. He found three whom he thought had lived between 170 and 175 years; two who had lived 160 to 170; three, 150–160; seven, 140–150; twenty-six, 130–140; eighty-four, 120–130; and thirteen hundred and ten, 100–110. Even Babbage assumed 150 as the limit of age in his abstract tables based upon seventeen hundred and fifty-one persons who had attained 100 or more. A. Haller (1766) accepted the age of Parr and Jenkins and is quite uncritical, saying that over one thousand men have lived to be 100–110, and twenty-five have lived to between 130–140. He even accepts Pliny’s story of a man who lived to be 300, and another 340 years. Hufeland seems to approve the traditional 157 years of Epimenides, 108 of Gorgias, 139 of Democritus, 100 of Zeno, 105 of St. Anthony, and credited J. Effingham in Cornwall with 144 years. W. J. Thoms (Human Longevity: Its Facts and Its Fictions, 1873) is skeptical of great longevities and found no sure case of centenarians in any noble family. J. Pinney (1856) went to the limit of credulity, believing that there were three eras in which men lived to 900, 450, and 70 respectively. G. C. Lewis thinks there is no authentic record of a life exceeding 100 years. W. Farr in 1871 said that in 1821 there were 216 centenarians in England; in 1841, 249; 1851, 215; 1861, 201; 1871, 160, making a total of 1,041, of whom 716 were females. Walford (in his Insurance Guide and Handbook) compiled a list of 218 centenarians from what he deemed authentic sources, and J. B. Bailey in 1888 in his Modern Methuselahs discussed the question; while Humphry (1889) in his nine hundred returns, found 52 centenarians, 36 of whom were women.