7:1. The animal whose development lasts two years would thus have 14 years of life. This law would give us 140 years, but the figure is too high, and Flourens has reduced the ratio to that of 5:1, which would still give us 120 years. Plato died in the act of conversation at 81; Isocrates wrote his Panathenaïcus at 94; Gorgias died in the full possession of his intellect at 107.
To reach the end of the promised longevity we must neither count on the elixir of life nor on the potable gold of the alchemists, nor on the stone of immortality which did not prevent its inventor, Paracelsus, from dying at the age of 58, nor on transfusion, nor on Graham's celestial bed, nor on King David's gerocomy, nor on any nostrum or remedy. Contra vim mortis non est medicamen in hortis, said the Salernian school. What Feuchtersleben said is most true, "The art of prolonging life consists in not cutting it short," and it is a hygiene, but a brilliant hygiene, such as that of which Metchnikoff traces us the future lines, which will realize the desires of nature.
And now shall we find that physiology has solved the enigma proposed by the Sphinx, and that it has answered these poignant questions:—Whence do we come? whither do we go? what is the end of life? The end of life is, to the physiologist as well as to Herbert Spencer, the tendency towards an existence as full and as long as possible, towards a life in conformity with real nature freed from the discordancies which still remain; it is the accomplishment of the harmonious cycle of our normal evolution. This ideal human nature, without discordancies, no longer vitiated as it is at present but
