The experiments of able naturalists afford the best answer to such statements. According to the best established authorities, pigeons, fowls, and ducks, live, in a natural state, from ten to twelve years. Magpies, crows, and jays, evince symptoms of caducity at the same age. Professor Hufeland, of Jena, who has devoted considerable time and attention to the study of the duration of life, assures us that the great eagle, and other birds of the larger kind, such as the pelican and ostrich, are very long-lived and of vigorous constitution. Specimens of the eagle tribe have been known, however, to survive in a menagerie upwards of a hundred years.
Hufeland relates that a Mr. Selwand, of London, received in 1793, from the Cape of Good Hope, a falcon wearing a golden collar inscribed “To His Majesty, King James of England, 1610.” The bird was supposed to have belonged to James I., and having escaped from its keepers, in order to avoid recapture, to have traversed Europe and Africa, to end its days in a state of nature among the Hottentots! Destiny, however, was not to be defied; and the prisoner was recaptured in its old age, and sent back to England. This incident probably originated in a hoax upon the credulity of Mr. Selwand, practised by one of his colonial correspondents. Moreover, Hufeland, after publishing his conviction of the prodigious longevity of the eagle tribe, was himself very likely to become the object of one of those mystifications, for which the supporters of new theories are considered fair game.
Credulity is unfortunately a weakness common to the human race; and a tendency to exaggeration is scarcely less universal. Between the two failings, monstrous stories obtain circulation; and as it is easier to assent than examine, the world becomes overrun with errors and prejudices. A curious anecdote related from mouth to mouth, becomes exaggerated into a miracle. Thus, as regards the longevity of parrots, a bird of this species which happens to survive three generations of the same family, though the period may not exceed thirty years, is talked of in the circle of their acquaintance as a Nestor or Methuselah; till, at last, from exaggeration to exaggeration, its age becomes converted into a miracle. No one, however, can personally attest the age of a parrot beyond fifty or sixty years. All the rest must be hearsay.
Among curious examples of longevity in animals, the dog of Ulysses is cited, by many ancient authors, for the intelligence displayed in his recognition of his master after twenty years’ absence. A mule, which lived to the age of ninety years, at Athens, has also been frequently cited.
The historian, Mézéray, relates, on the authority of Flodard, that Loup Asnard, Duke of Aquitaine, on coming to do homage to Raoul, King of France, about the beginning of the tenth century, appeared before the monarch mounted on a horse a hundred years old. Such exceptions, however, even if authentic, tend no more to prove the longevity of dogs, horses or mules, than the incontestible fact that certain men, even in modern times, have survived to the age of a century and a half, tend to establish that period as the span of human existence.
CHAPTER II.
INCOMBUSTIBLE MEN.
There are instances in which it may be fairly said that seeing is not believing. In the case of a variety of persons who have exhibited themselves, in different times and countries, as endowed with the natural power of resistance to fire, the frightful feats displayed serve only to convince the spectator, that the incombustibility of the exhibitants is but a skilful effort of legerdemain.