There are many who now think more or less as does H. G. Wells[27] that the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last few years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to nature and place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture if the race is to escape premature decay. There is only too much to indicate that mankind, in Europe at least if not throughout the world, has reached the “dangerous age” that marks the dawn of senescence and that, unless we can develop what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for humanity,” a new social consciousness, and a new instinct for service and for posterity, our elaborate civilization with all its institutions will become a Frankenstein monster escaping the control of the being that devised and constructed it and will bring ruin to both him and to itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and world-wide reëducation, and the development of a richer, riper old age, are our only sources of hope for we can look to no others to arrest the degenerative processes of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we have to face a new problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be and how can we best prepare for it betimes?
As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross[28] tells us “one-eighth of her people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered ourselves as par excellence the land of young people and ideas. Our growth has been phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely, so that we profited to the full by steam, rapid transportation, invention, by our coal, oil, forests, and virgin soil, and especially by the ideals of liberty that were brought here by the first waves of immigrants to our shores. These were followed later, however, by those who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often Mediterranean stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain; but even this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the most stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and although we reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first visit to Europe, when the world came nearer than ever before since early Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of national sovereignty and a new world law backed by a new world power, this brief vision of a federated world has faded and we now realize that if we cannot make a break with history and leave much of it to the dead past, if we cannot transcend the boundaries that, especially in Europe, are now far too narrow for modern conditions, and if we cannot fearlessly enter upon the longer apprenticeship to life, which is now too short for mastery, we shall drift into far more disastrous wars that will leave even the victors exhausted, and mankind will either sink into an impotent senility or into a Tarzan bestialism, which from the standpoint of Clarence Day (The Simian World) would seem not impossible.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE
The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.
Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live. In the Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in circumference, which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to continue living fifty years after a third of it was destroyed. It must have been several thousand years old, but as its trunk was hollowed there was no way of ascertaining its age. In the Cape Verde Islands stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which Adanson estimated to be 5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in Mexico are thought to be quite as old. The big trees of California are several thousand years old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have lived 5,000 years. We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these monsters of the vegetable world with their concentric rings marked—“this growth was made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this when Christ was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning, tempests, etc.
As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life can also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is that many species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the lower forms of life the larval is far longer than the adult stage. The seventeen-year locust, for example, lives out most of its time underground, the imago form continuing but little more than a month. Most butterflies are annual, although those that fail to copulate may hibernate and live through another season, while some are known to have lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the season but queens live from two to five years. J. H. Gurney[29] thinks the passerines are the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years, that the lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty, and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often assigned, one being said to have spoken a language that had become extinct. As to animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens their normal length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility. Beasts of prey breed slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit is short-lived. But for increased fecundity species subject to high risk would die out. While there is a certain correlation between size and age, since large animals require more time to grow, it is extremely limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals the period the new-born take to double in size is an index of the normal duration of life; but this, too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an essential factor and others think that length of life may be inversely as the reproductive tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our knowledge is still very limited.
When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter, dedicates this to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been found 160 years later. This is the earliest record I find of animal longevity. We have many tables since Flourens attempted, with great pains, to construct one, and from the latest of these at hand I select the following of those animals popularly supposed to be able to attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile, 100; crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100; raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E. Ray Lankester[30] says, we know almost nothing definite of the length of life of larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we could find a criterion of the end of the growth period in the union of the epiphyses of the bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down the law that for both mammals and man longevity is, on the average, about five times that of this period of growth. We know far more as to the span of the shorter- than of the longer-lived members of the brute creation. We also know far more of domestic animals than of their wild congeners. The former doubtless have lived longer because better protected. Darwin wrote that he had no information in regard to the longevity of the nearest wild representatives of our domestic animals or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts whom Lankester addressed upon the subject informed him that almost nothing was known of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist, Gunther, said, “There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes of death of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them. Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is so short that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from ovum to ovum. There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much closer relation between the life span of individuals of the same than between those of different species, specific longevity meaning the average length of life of the individual of the species. Of all this we know far more of man than of any other creature.
If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all their lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet appear that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he should do if the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more favorable environment than nature and instinct have provided for him. Species, like individuals, very probably have a term of life and become extinct with age, as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But here, too, there is no sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant the generalizations so often met with concerning phyletic immortality or senescence. To some aspects of this theme I shall recur later in this volume.
Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know almost nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably also considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if again in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat simian Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon type he must have still further increased his longevity. But through all the paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H. F. Osborn calculates[31]) there are no data either in the skeletal remains or in the implements he used that shed any clear light upon the subject; and the same is true of the neolithic cults that flowered in the lake- or pile-dwellings. Bones show different stages of development, and teeth, always remarkably well preserved, often show the effects of use; a very few represent children but not one illustrates extreme old age according to the osseous or dental criteria of modern times. Hence we may conjecture that the attainment of great age under the conditions of life then prevailing was very rare. It would seem also that if life had been long and its experiences well ripened, preserved, and transmitted (so that each new generation would not merely repeat the life of that which had preceded it but profit by its lessons), progress would not have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it might be urged perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now, most of the people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old early, and since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it would make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem premature to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who felt their physical powers beginning to abate—at least the more sagacious of them—had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and even increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom in counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of all this paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us. Nor do we see much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries—bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have been used, survives.[32] Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost nothing of how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature, or in what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.