In the light of recent scientific research with flies, Cornaro probably inherited his longevity from long-lived ancestors, and would have done about as well on a less restricted diet: he might reasonably have lasted as long if not as comfortably. Ideas have changed since Pope asked himself,—
Why has not man a microscopic eye?—
and promptly answered,—
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,
T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n?
Man since then has provided himself with a remarkably good microscopic eye. He has inspected the mite, and discovered resemblances between this innocently disgusting little insect and himself, which make it desirable, in some cases, to suspend the swatter, and study instead of assassinate. Granting that the proper study of mankind is Man, the proper study of mankind is Flies; for the days of a fly present an entertaining and instructive parallel to the years of a man: a seventy-year-old man and a seventy-day-old fly are contemporaries; other things being equal, they might almost be called twins. Confined in glass bottles and observed impartially from birth to burial, each baby fly, it appears, inherits a maximum number of days on this perplexing planet, and lives fewer according to the activity with which he expends his inheritance. If flies had copybooks one might compose a maxim for little flies to copy,—
Do not fly too much or fast,
And you will much longer last.
Thus one scientific gentleman has watched, godlike, the lives of 5836 flies—3216 fair flies (if I may so call them), and 2620 of their natural, and only, admirers—from their separate birth-minutes till each in turn paid his or her little debt to nature, and passed away. It is an odd thing to contemplate—this self-election of a man to the positions of guardian, health officer, divine providence, nursemaid, matchmaker, clergyman, physician, undertaker, and sexton to 5836 flies. Yet it redounds to his credit, and is another proof of the poet’s contention that we men are superior: for what fly would ever think of studying us to find out anything about himself? And, by deduction, I, like the little fly, inherit my span of life, although either accident or a germ may get me if I don’t watch out.
But even if man, like the fly, inherits his individual length of life, he will, again like the fly, go on living it with little concern as to whatever invisible string may be fastened to his inheritance. He will think hopefully that any ancestor he has had who died by violence or a germ might otherwise have lived to be as hale and hearty as Father William, that lively sage whose habit was to stand on his head at intervals, and to enter a door by turning a back-somersault. Heredity is still a mystery; the ancestry of free men is much more complicated than that of flies in bottles; and any of us, if he anxiously carried his genealogical research far enough back, would find a goodly number of forbears, prematurely carried off, from whom he might reasonably have inherited quite a lot of what the scientific mind calls the “hypothetical substance or substances which normally prevent old age and natural death.” Flies growing gracefully old in glass bottles therefore need not worry us, and every ancestor who has been hanged is a reason for optimism.
And there is another reason even more valuable than a pendent ancestor. You and I, gentle Reader, have souls (though there may be times of discouragement when we wish we hadn’t), and old age is a mere trivial incident in our jolly eternal lives. Willy-nilly, we begin growing older, by the conventional measurement of time, with our first breath; but who can prove that we are not in reality very much older than we look in the beginning, and very much younger than we look in the end? I get these sober thoughts from the laboratory rather than the pulpit, from evolution rather than dogma. O aged fly, to whom your seventy days are a long life and your glass bottle a perfectly natural and normal world in which to have lived it! O aged man, to whom your seventy years are a long life, and who may also have lived it, for all you know, in a kind of glass bottle, big enough to contain comfortably this little planet and all the visible stars! Whoever respects age for its own sake must impartially salute you both.
“It is a man’s own fault,” said Dr. Johnson, then seventy years old, but no pantaloon, “it is from want of use, if the mind grows torpid in old age.” And so plausible is this observation, that any reasonably intelligent man might make it to his wife at breakfast without at all astonishing her. Here, to be sure, one gets no help from flies in glass bottles who depart this world according as they fly more or fly less, for theirs apparently is a democracy in which no outside observer can yet say that any one fly thinks more or thinks less than another. A scientific study of 5836 old men (in biographies instead of bottles) would very likely do no more than verify the generalization that any thinker may make at breakfast. And this being the case, civilization tends naturally enough to reduce the number of pantaloons. Universal education, books, newspapers, magazines, politics, movies, anything and everything that to any degree employs and exercises the mind, postpones its torpidity; and statistics indicate that an increasing proportion of babies live to be middle-aged people—but a decreasing proportion of middle-aged people live to be old enough to become pantaloons. For many a not-so-very-promising baby survives nowadays who would have perished under earlier conditions; and many a man gets to middle life who would otherwise be dead already, and lacks the “pep,” as a popular magazine editor might say, to get very much further. What a survival of the fittest, for example, was that of the beautiful Galeria Copiola, who, I have read, made her first dazzling appearance in the theatre of ancient Rome at the age of ninety! She acted and danced; and Roman playgoers of seventy, sitting in the front rows, had opportunity to become madly infatuated with a charmer twenty years their senior, such as now falls only to the lot of the college undergraduate or the tired business man. And if anybody doubts this surprising youthfulness of Galeria, I offer the corroborative evidence of the seventeenth-century pamphlet, “The Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr,” in which John Taylor, the Water Poet, describes the pre-Adamite who was brought up to London at the age of 152, met the King, and had such a great good time in general, that his death nine months later was attributed to over-excitement.