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Show DOES IT PAY TO LIVE LONG I - V' - f Sir George Birdwood, M. D., a noted English scientist, himself an octogenarian, octoge-narian, throws a new light oa the question by suggesting that abnormal longevity Is a most undesirable thing. Sir George spent nearly fifty years in the pubUc service. He was formerly an Rrmy surgeon and professor o! anatomy and physiology. He was in the India office for thirty-one years . and Is founder of Primrose day. In India his name is a household word. Writing to a contemporary, he refers re-fers to the people who have been telling tell-ing us "how they have, in their own thinking, managed to achieve this profoundly pro-foundly questionable glory; for Imagine, Im-agine, millionaires hugging their hoards for 100 years, to leave them to already senile sons to go on hugging them for twenty or thirty years more, and so from generation to generation, until the heavy drag of these veritable verita-ble Struldbrugs stops the turning of a too 'conservative' world on its axis. - "It is, indeed, a most disheartening sign this desire of people to live beyond be-yond three score years and ten, unless its prolongation is desirable In the interests in-terests of others; and, fortunately, these abnormal ages of eighty, ninety and one hundred years are not to be achieved, they simply occur as exceptions to a rule. The question under discussion in its true form is not how to live to four score or five score, but how to live proficiently and profitably and pleasantly alike for yourself and for others." Sir George concludes by quoting the words on the ring of Senecianus: "Live careless of the gods." |