- ments, he made the assertion that he believed
that the theaters and music-halls should be controlled by the churches.
The Sunday-school Chronicle sent an interviewer to ask him why he made this statement. His answer follows: "First of all," said the pastor, "I have been so deeply imprest by the sense of awful loneliness which is experienced by young people coming to central London from the provinces. I know for a fact that scores of young men and women go to the bad because of the absolute friendlessness of their lives. Six months ago I spent two days at the Old Bailey Sessions House trying to snatch a girl of nineteen from prison. She came to London motherless and friendless, and was spoken to kindly by a young man in Oxford street. She appreciated the apparent sympathy which this stranger extended to her—well, the rest of the story of her downfall may be imagined. Many of these young people have nowhere to go after business hours but the music-hall or the public-house, and the things they take away from these places and retail in their houses of business are the questionable jokes which they have heard. So for these young people I plead for churches that are homes and amusements that are healthy."—The Advance.
(1877)
Lonesomeness Abated—See Reminders. LONGEVITY ACCOUNTED FOR Senator Chauncey M. Depew, entertained at a dinner on the occasion of his seventy-sixth birthday, said: Fifty-four years in public and semipublic life and upon the platform all over this country and in Europe for all sorts of objects in every department of human interest have given me a larger acquaintance than almost anybody living. The sum of observation and experience growing out of this opportunity is that granted normal conditions, no hereditary troubles, and barring accidents and plagues, the man who dies before seventy commits suicide. Mourning the loss of friends has led me to study the causes of their earlier departure. It could invariably be traced to intemperance in the broadest sense of that word; intemperance in eating, in drinking, in the gratification of desires, in work, and in irregularity of hours, crowning it all with unnecessary worry.—New York Times.
(1878)
Longevity and Work—See Industry and Longevity. LONGEVITY, EXAMPLE OF One of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole record of longevity is reported from Pesth, in Hungary, where a beggar, aged eighty-four, tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Danube because he was no longer able to support his father and mother, who are one hundred and fifteen and one hundred and ten years old, respectively. When he told this story, after his rescue, it was laughed at, but a police inquiry showed it to be true. The family are Magyars from the extreme south of Hungary.—Public Opinion.
(1879)
LONGEVITY INCREASING
"It is estimated," said Dr. Felton, the
learned Georgia statesman, divine, and M.D.,
in an address before the graduating class of
Atlanta Medical College, "that human life
has increased twenty-five per cent in the
past fifty years." The average human life
in Rome under Cæsar was eighteen years;
now it is forty. The average in France fifty
years ago was twenty-eight; the mean duration
in 1887 was forty-five and one-half
years. In Geneva during the thirteenth century
a generation played its part upon the
stage and disappeared in fourteen years; now
the drama requires forty years before the
curtain falls. During the golden reign of
good Queen Bess, in London and all the
large cities of merry old England, fifty out
of every 1,000 paid the last debt to nature
early, which means instead of threescore-and-ten,
they averaged but one score. Now,
in the city of London, the average is forty-seven
years.—Dr. Todd.
(1880)
See Improved Conditions.
LONGEVITY, RECIPES FOR
A complete list of infallible prescriptions
for the prolongation of human life would
fill a voluminous book, and would include
some decidedly curious specifics. "To what
do you ascribe your hale old age?" the Emperor
Augustus asked a centenarian whom
he found wrestling in the palestra and
bandying jokes with the young athletes.
"Intus mulso, foris oleo," said the old fellow.
"Oil for the skin and mead (water and
honey) for the inner man." Cardanus suggests
that old age might be indefinitely postponed
by a semifluid diet warmed (like
mother's milk) to the exact temperature of
the human system; and Voltaire accuses his
