Читать книгу Senescence, the Last Half of Life - G. Stanley Hall - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.

Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live. In the Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in circumference, which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to continue living fifty years after a third of it was destroyed. It must have been several thousand years old, but as its trunk was hollowed there was no way of ascertaining its age. In the Cape Verde Islands stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which Adanson estimated to be 5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in Mexico are thought to be quite as old. The big trees of California are several thousand years old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have lived 5,000 years. We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these monsters of the vegetable world with their concentric rings marked—“this growth was made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this when Christ was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning, tempests, etc.

As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life can also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is that many species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the lower forms of life the larval is far longer than the adult stage. The seventeen-year locust, for example, lives out most of its time underground, the imago form continuing but little more than a month. Most butterflies are annual, although those that fail to copulate may hibernate and live through another season, while some are known to have lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the season but queens live from two to five years. J.H. Gurney29 thinks the passerines are the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years, that the lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty, and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often assigned, one being said to have spoken a language that had become extinct. As to animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens their normal length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility. Beasts of prey breed slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit is short-lived. But for increased fecundity species subject to high risk would die out. While there is a certain correlation between size and age, since large animals require more time to grow, it is extremely limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals the period the new-born take to double in size is an index of the normal duration of life; but this, too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an essential factor and others think that length of life may be inversely as the reproductive tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our knowledge is still very limited.

When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter, dedicates this to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been found 160 years later. This is the earliest record I find of animal longevity. We have many tables since Flourens attempted, with great pains, to construct one, and from the latest of these at hand I select the following of those animals popularly supposed to be able to attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile, 100; crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100; raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E. Ray Lankester30 says, we know almost nothing definite of the length of life of larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we could find a criterion of the end of the growth period in the union of the epiphyses of the bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down the law that for both mammals and man longevity is, on the average, about five times that of this period of growth. We know far more as to the span of the shorter- than of the longer-lived members of the brute creation. We also know far more of domestic animals than of their wild congeners. The former doubtless have lived longer because better protected. Darwin wrote that he had no information in regard to the longevity of the nearest wild representatives of our domestic animals or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts whom Lankester addressed upon the subject informed him that almost nothing was known of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist, Gunther, said, “There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes of death of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them. Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is so short that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from ovum to ovum. There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much closer relation between the life span of individuals of the same than between those of different species, specific longevity meaning the average length of life of the individual of the species. Of all this we know far more of man than of any other creature.

If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all their lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet appear that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he should do if the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more favorable environment than nature and instinct have provided for him. Species, like individuals, very probably have a term of life and become extinct with age, as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But here, too, there is no sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant the generalizations so often met with concerning phyletic immortality or senescence. To some aspects of this theme I shall recur later in this volume.

Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know almost nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably also considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if again in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat simian Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon type he must have still further increased his longevity. But through all the paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H.F. Osborn calculates31) there are no data either in the skeletal remains or in the implements he used that shed any clear light upon the subject; and the same is true of the neolithic cults that flowered in the lake- or pile-dwellings. Bones show different stages of development, and teeth, always remarkably well preserved, often show the effects of use; a very few represent children but not one illustrates extreme old age according to the osseous or dental criteria of modern times. Hence we may conjecture that the attainment of great age under the conditions of life then prevailing was very rare. It would seem also that if life had been long and its experiences well ripened, preserved, and transmitted (so that each new generation would not merely repeat the life of that which had preceded it but profit by its lessons), progress would not have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it might be urged perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now, most of the people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old early, and since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it would make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem premature to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who felt their physical powers beginning to abate—at least the more sagacious of them—had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and even increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom in counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of all this paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us. Nor do we see much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries—bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have been used, survives.32 Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost nothing of how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature, or in what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.

What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children only inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and to distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable to realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even kinship between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it was probably always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for himself as complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher forms of animal life with which his own was so intimately associated. Our ignorance of all these stages of human evolution becomes all the more pathetic as we are now coming to understand that it was then that all the deeper unconscious and dispositional strata of Mansoul, which still dominate us far more than we are even yet aware, were being laid down, and it is upon these traits that the later and conscious superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard things survive the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the softest of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.

Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and often contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive study of mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier stages of civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign language. Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives and, with Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and ideas of pubescent initiation;33 while animism, marriage rites, property and ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and trapping, war weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of the “medicine man,” dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems, language, fire-making, industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore, and many other themes have had comprehensive and comparative treatment. But I am able to find nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our most accomplished American scholar in this field, knows of nothing compendious) on old age in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has so far produced no gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of travel and exploration among the so-called lower races of mankind, only to find nothing or brief and more or less incidental mentions of senescence. This neglect is itself significant of the inconspicuous rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also of the lack of vital interest in the theme by investigators.

From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn of people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the Caspian Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the practice of devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most respectful method of disposing of their remains. In a few cases this custom is combined with that of killing both the old and sick, but it is more often simply a form of burial. It prevails in many parts of Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Reclus34 tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and sickly people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of it.” It is a matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.” Thereupon an oval pit is roughly excavated in a burial ground and filled with moss. Heavy stones are rolled near, the extremities of the victim are bound to two horizontal poles, and on the headstone a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in torrents over the moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red couch. In the twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the poles. Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends would pretend not to hear it. So his moriturus saluto is “Good night, friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance and open his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled to death in no time. Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are killed by being exposed; the old, by being deserted.

In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native, described the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said, catch otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they were killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts of their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be killed by friends and relatives.

Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer be of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox, accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut at a considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid in the middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company returns, deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing they can do to thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a burden.

With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit is ripe” and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing him to pieces and eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged are often cruelly treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the East African tribes the aged and all supposed to be at the point of death are slain and eaten. One author tells us that among the Fijians the practice of burying alive is “so common that but few old and decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert Spencer’s anthropological charts we are told that among the Chippewas “old age is the greatest calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is neglected and treated with disrespect.”

C. Wissler35 says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal practice of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other races.” On the other hand, among all hunting people who shift from place to place the infirm are often of necessity left behind to their fate. Yet the reported examples of such cruelties can usually be matched by instances of the opposite tenor. He goes on to say that since the mythologies of various tribal groups contain rites showing retribution for such cruelties we must regard them as, on the whole, exceptional.

S.K. Hutton36 says,

I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I would have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is, the Eskimo wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline, and few live long after sixty. I have known a few over seventy, and the people told me with wonderment about an old woman who lived to be eighty-two and who worked to the last. But these are great rarities. It must be a unique thing in one’s lifetime to meet with an Eskimo great-grandmother. The very old people seem always to be active to the last. They have an unusual amount of vitality and die in the harness, dropping out like those too tired to go any further and passing away without illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still scrape the seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger women lack; if they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they can sit behind a wall of snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the sleepy rock-cod through a hole.

C.A. Scott37 tells us that in certain south Australian tribes it is taboo to catch or eat certain animals until a man has reached a prescribed advanced age, these animals being easiest to catch and the most wholesome and thus best adapted to old people’s use. One of the chief maxims in Tonga is to reverence the gods, the chief, and old people. In Java, among the Iroquois, Dakotas, Comanches, the Hill tribes of India (Santals and Kukis), the Snakes and Zunis, much respect is shown to the aged.

K. Routledge38 says, “part of the deference paid to advancing years, whether in men or women, is due to fear. Old age has something uncanny about it, and old persons could probably ‘make medicine’ or work havoc, were they so inclined.” One chief said that in councils the old women would have their way because “it is a great work to have borne a child.” A young warrior is taught to get out of the road for an old woman. She does not, however, take part in the sacrifices, although one called herself the wife of God and seemed to have established a sort of cult. This was because she was a woman of much character. Here the mothers take full part in initiations. The dignity and self-reliance of the older women is remarkable. When a woman is so old that she has no teeth she is said to be “filled with intelligence” and on her death receives the high honor of burial instead of being thrown out to the hyenas.

A.L. Cureau39 tells us that the Negro is short-lived and that if some lucky star enables him to reach forty he becomes a man of importance, although death does not usually permit him to enjoy this distinction long. “During more than twenty years I never knew more than four or five who could have been considered sixty-five or seventy years of age, and even persons who were from fifty to sixty are very uncommon. At the age of thirty-five or forty they all exhibit signs of premature decrepitude.” He thinks the death rate from forty to forty-five very high. Disease among the Africans is limited to only a few general troubles. Burial is usually by interment, although in some districts the dead are eaten, while elsewhere they are thrown into the river or left lying on the ground in some remote spot. Respect for the chief, however, continues to be observed even after his death. But customs are growing mild, and “if human sacrifice still takes place in locations that are most remote from our stations, the fact is kept a profound secret.”

H.A. Junod40 gives a melancholy picture of old age, especially for the leading man of the tribe. His wives die, his glory fades, his crown loses its luster and if it is scratched or broken he cannot repair it, he is forsaken, less respected, and often only a burden unwillingly supported. “The children laugh at him. If the cook sends them to their lonely grandfather with his share of food in the leaky old hut, the young rascals are capable of eating it on the way, pretending afterwards that they did what they were told.” When, between two huts, under the shelter of the woods the old man warms his round-shouldered back in the rays of the sun, lost in some senile dream, his former friends point to him and say, “It is the bogie man, the ogre.” Mature people show little more consideration for the old than do the young ones. Junod knew personally an old man and woman who, when their children moved to another part of the country, were left under a roof with no sides, without food, and were almost imbecile. “In times of war old people die in great numbers. During the movements of panic they are hidden in the woods, in the swamps or palm trees, while all the able-bodied population runs away. They are killed by the enemy, who spare no one, or they die in their hiding places of misery and hunger. Thus the evening of life is very sad for the poor Thonga.” There are, however, children who to the end show devotion to their parents. Those old people are most to be pitied who fall to the charge of remote relatives.

A. Hrdlicka41 says, “The proportion of nonagenarians, and especially centenarians, among the Indians is far in excess of that among native white Americans.” As to the source of error, he thinks this is somewhat offset by the “marked general interest centering about the oldest of every tribe.” He found twenty-four per million among the Indians as against three per million among native whites who had reached a hundred, and says, “The relative excess of aged persons (80 years and above) among the Indians would signify only that the infirmities and diseases known ordinarily as those of old age are less grave among them, a conclusion in harmony with general observation.” Among the fifteen tribes embraced in this very careful and valuable investigation, Hrdlicka found in the old far less grayness and baldness and far better teeth than among the whites. They had more wrinkles but their muscular force was better preserved. Many debilitating effects among the whites are less so among the Indians. In general there is some bending and emaciation and the hair grows iron gray or yellowish-gray, but never white. Nor did he find among those of ninety a single one who was demented or helpless. The aged were generally more or less neglected, and had to care for themselves and help the younger. Owing to the diminution of the alveoli and adipose tissue, “the jaw looks more prominent, prognathism disappears, and the face looks shorter.” There is an increase in the nasal index, the nose becomes broader and shorter, the malar bones more prominent. The eyes lose their luster and generally become narrowed, with adhesions at the canthi, particularly the external. The hardening of arteries is certainly not common. Of 716 well preserved males of 65, only 4 per cent showed baldness; and among 377 women there was but one slightly bald, the baldness being about equally common on vertex and forehead.

In W.I. Thomas’s Source Book for Social Origins containing articles by various authors, we are told that among some of the Australian tribes old age is a very prominent factor in preëminence. After they have become feeble the old may have great authority, somewhat in proportion to what they know of ancient lore, magic, medicine, and especially if they are totem heads. Their authority is not patriarchal, and yet among the Yakuts, whether they are rich or poor, good or bad, the old are sometimes beaten by their children, especially if feeble-minded. On the other hand, a weak man of seventy may beat his forty-year-old son who is strong and rich but in awe of his parent because he has so much to inherit from him. The transfer of authority and property to the son often comes very late. The greatest number of suicides is among the old people. A man who beat his mother said, “Let her cry and go hungry. She made me cry more than once and beat me for trifles,” etc.

In this volume we are told, too, that even the Fuegians, who in times of scarcity kill and eat their old women for food, are generally affectionate, and until the whites interfered with their social order the old often had considerable authority. They sometimes prepare programs for ceremonials, which are very strictly observed by a hundred younger men. In some Australian tribes, too, a man’s authority generally increases with age; and this is true, though less frequently, of women. The old enforce the strictest marriage rules and have much influence over the thoughts and feelings of the tribes. The old men often sit in a circle and speak on public matters, one after another, the young men standing outside in silence. A few old men may retire to discuss secret matters of importance. Offenders are often brought before them for trial and sentence. The old men of a tribe often band themselves together and by working on the superstitions of the tribe secure for themselves not only comfort but unbounded influence. In the famous Duk-Duk ceremonial they alone were in the secret, and all others were impressed with the supernatural character of the actors in these rites.

Ploss and Bartels42 amplify the great changes senescence brings to women. Age not only obliterates race but sex. It often makes the most beautiful into the most ugly, for handsome old women among primitives are unknown. Children dread them. They often become careless of looks, the hand is claw-like, etc. A widespread German superstition is that if an old woman crosses the path of a hunter he will get nothing. They are ominous for marriages and some neurotics cannot look at them. They are sometimes said to have seven lives. Hans Sachs in poetry and Cranach in painting, in describing the fountains of youth, represent chiefly old women entering on the one side with every sign of decrepitude and coming out on the other beautiful, with wonderful toilets, and sometimes immediately engaging in orgies. Old women in early times sometimes had a guild, devised means of conjuration, made pacts or leagues with the devil, presided over the Walpurgis festivals, conjured with magic words, had evil eyes, knew strange brews, sometimes committed all kinds of lasciviousness with devils, might transform themselves into shapes as attractive as Circe for Ulysses or Medea for Jason, or take the more ominous forms of Hecate and Lamea. These maleficent creatures often allied themselves with black cats, serpents, owls, bats, had their salves and witch sabbaths, etc.

Frazer approaches this subject from a different angle. In the second chapter of his volume entitled The Dying God he tells us that in Fiji self-immolation is by no means rare, and the Fijians believe that as they leave this life they will remain ever after. This is a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude or from a crippled condition by voluntary death. “The custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is connected with their superstitions regarding a future life.” To this must be added the contempt that attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults that await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. So when a man feels age creeping on, so that he can no longer fully discharge the duties or enjoy the pleasures of life, he calls his relations, tells them he is worn out and useless, that they are ashamed of him, and he is determined to be buried. So on an appointed day they meet and bury him alive. In the New Hebrides the aged were buried alive at their own request. “It was considered a disgrace to a family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.” A Jewish tribe of Abyssinia never let a person die a natural death, for if any of their relatives was near expiring the priest of the tribe was called to cut his throat. If this ceremony was omitted, they believed the departed soul had not entered the mansions of the blessed. Heraclitus thought that the souls of those who die in battle are purer than those who die of disease. In a South American tribe, when a man is at the point of death his nearest relatives break his spine with an axe, for to die a natural death is the greatest misfortune. In Paraguay, when a man grows weary of life, a feast is made, with revelry and dancing, and the man is gummed and feathered with the plumage of many birds and a huge jar is fixed in the ground, the mouth of which is closed over him with baked clay. Thus he goes to his doom “more joyful and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”

With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another tribe he requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him, choosing the manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors assemble and he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere, if a man dies a natural death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he may seem to be received with the same honors in the next world as if he had died in battle, as Odin wanted for his disciples. The Wends once killed their aged parents and other kinsfolk and boiled and ate their bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die thus rather than drag out a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings are killed when their strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if their pontiff died a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained it by his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing vigor the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should die.” So the king who showed signs of illness or failing strength was put to death.

One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and suffocation.

This custom persisted till five generations ago.

Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while he was yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to death. According to the common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had a right thus to fight the king in possession, and if he succeeded in killing him he reigned in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only take place by night with any prospect of success. Then, according to custom, his guards had to be dismissed; so the hours of darkness were of special peril. It was a point of honor for the king not to call his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at which the king was killed would seem to have been commonly between forty and fifty. The Zulus put a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles and gray hair. Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a fixed term, perhaps because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest symptom of decay.

A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture. He tells us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a primeval rock jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king watched all night with drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself sooner or later be slain by his successor, for this was the rule of the sanctuary. The candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by one stronger or craftier. Although he held the title of king, no crowned head was ever uneasier. The least relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had no parallel in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies show the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences, the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence we must study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer tells us that the object of his book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once, only a runaway slave could break off the mistletoe from the oak, and success in this enabled him to fight the priest in single combat; if he won he would become King of the Woods.

There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 et seq. the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Cainan, 970; Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969; Lamech, 777. All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90—Adam at 130, Methuselah at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all modern scholars these great ages have been regarded as mythical, but so scientific and modern a student as T.E. Young,43 who is very skeptical about all later records of great longevity, devotes a long chapter to these records, which he is almost inclined to credit. He goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses, epitomizes diverse writers on the subject, and finally raises the question whether or not in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different and more uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented prolongation of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient literature of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand years and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life of saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as measured by length of life is slowly but irresistibly waning.44

The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is a factor never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of juices. Perhaps the energy of the sun is decreasing and also the productivity of the earth. Indeed, it is very probable that the solar system has attained its maturity or midway stage. From such data Young concludes, “The average intellectual condition of the present period, I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no sign whatever of an ampler development.” Knowledge has become mechanical and has lost its capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation. The highest faculties are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent function. Man has reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also hindrances, so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.

The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient of days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age, this trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus, who died in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect for age, and many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of the prophets were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this has its nursery echo in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom little children came out of the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou bald-head.” He “turned back and cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.” No passage in all the literature of the world has had such influence as Psalms 90:10.45 It is pathetic to see how incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old age and how not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not more, among the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a decree of fate.

Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version,46 with his explanations in parentheses:

Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the years draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere is darkened the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of the day, and the moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early manhood), and the stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in mature age), and the clouds return after the rain (for the old, clouds and rainy days increase); when the keepers of the house (hands) tremble, and the men of power (the bones, especially the backbone) bend themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease and the ladies that look out through the lattices (eyes) are darkened; the doors are shut toward the street (secretion and excretion cease); he riseth at the voice of the birds (awakens too early), and all the daughters of song are brought low (grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and fears are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed), the silver (spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl (brain) crushed in, the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows weak), and the wheel breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs down). Man is going to his eternal house (the grave), and the mourners go about in the street. Vanity of vanities (all is transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, and all that is coming is vanity.

L. Löw47 collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud, German and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old which ancient Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that sight sometimes comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes cases where wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful shade and increased in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay, have sometimes grown from new roots—occasionally more than once. In many cases sex potency has been restored as well as muscular strength, freshness of complexion, and, more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course, of many races detail cases where magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a hundred, years has converted age into youth, and in Semitic folklore this is often connected with the passage, “The righteous shall renew their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were perhaps even more fond than other people of dividing life into periods, usually in conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of age with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps mention Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four temperaments. For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of excitation, the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of impulse to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic and emotionally characterized by Stimmungen. It judges the items of experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates readily and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric, practical, executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas and even phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old age is phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to abate the life of affectivity and take the attitude of laissez faire.

In the modern Jewish family the authority of and respect for the father is great, more among the orthodox and conservative than the liberal and reformed wing of Judaism. The grandfather and -mother are always provided for, although their authority and influence are generally greatly diminished.

Perhaps mention should here be made of the very interesting medieval legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, although it is of Christian origin. This cobbler, past whose shop Jesus bore the Cross on the way to Calvary, reproached Him, and Jesus, turning, sentenced him to “tarry till I come,” which meant that his punishment was to remain alive on earth until the second coming of the Messiah. In some of the many forms of this tradition he is represented at the time as being of about Jesus’ age and every time he reached a hundred as being set back again to this stage of life; while in others he is described with ever increasing symptoms of age, and in Doré’s illustrations he is depicted as wandering the earth, appearing here and there and, when recognized, generally mysteriously vanishing, ever seeking death, visiting graveyards and regions smitten with plague and famine, rushing into the mêlée of battles, etc.—but all in vain. He longs with an ever increasing passion to pay the debt of nature but is unable to do so and must rove the earth until the Judgment Day, when he hopes his penalty may be remitted and that he may keep some “rendezvous with Death.”48

In ancient Greece we may begin with Sparta and its very unique gerousia, the council of twenty-eight old men who must be over sixty, when the duty to bear arms ceased and when by the original law of Sparta men were put to death. This council of old men at the height of its power is sometimes compared with that of the boulé in Athens but was even greater, for although it held its mandate from the people and its members were annually elected, they could depose the five ephors and the kings and even cause them to be put to death. J.P. Mahaffy49 condemns the parochial politics of Sparta, where ignorant old men watched over and secured the closest adhesion of the state to the system of a semifabulous legislator, and compares the rigidity of the Spartan system, not based on written laws, with the effects of excessive reverence of ancestors in China in retarding progress.50 He thinks that here we have “one of the most signal instances in history of the vast mischief done by the government of old men. All the leading patriots, nay all the leading politicians, were past their prime. There was not a single young man of ability taking part in public affairs.” This, he thinks, was more or less true of Athens in the early days, and he goes on to say that if any young orator tried to advance new ideas, the old masters, who had the ear of the assembly, were out upon him as a hireling and traitor so that he had to retire from the agora into private life, and some were thus driven into exile. He even holds that the sudden growth of the philosophic schools a little later was due to the activities that but for this diversion would have been directed to politics.

But in Greece at its best opposite influences were at work and generally predominated. In the Homeric age “the king or chief, as soon as his bodily vigor passed away, was apparently pushed aside by younger and stronger men. He might either maintain himself by extraordinary usefulness, like Nestor, or be supported by his children, if they chanced to be affectionate and dutiful; but except in these cases his lot was sad indeed.”51 Achilles laments that nearby chiefs are ill-treating the aged Peleus, and we see Laertes, the father of Ulysses, exiled to a barren farm in the country and spending the later years of his life in poverty and hardship. Hence when we see princes who had sons that might return any day to avenge them treated in such a way, we must infer that unprotected old age commanded very little veneration among the Homeric Greeks, so that worn-out men received scant consideration. Among friends and neighbors in peace and in good humor they were treated with consideration, but with the first clash of interests all this vanished. Interference of the gods to protect their weakness was no longer believed in. Thus the exact prescription of the conduct of the young toward the elders in Sparta was an exception, and their treatment of old age as illustrated by the well-worn story of an old man coming into the theater at Athens and looking in vain for a seat until he came near the Spartan embassy, which at once rose and made room for him, was suggestive. It was well added that while the Athenians applauded this act it is doubtful if they imitated it. Probably the disparagement of old age prompted Athenian gentlemen to resort to every means to prolong their youth. Zeus came to rule the turbulent and self-willed lesser gods on Olympus, who were perpetually trying to evade and thwart him, by occasionally terrifying them, and he seemed to be able to count on no higher principle of loyalty.

The Greeks loved wealth because it gave pleasure, and perhaps in this fact we have one key to another horror that old age had for them. Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age with its pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares besiege the mind; nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun but are hateful to boys and despised among women, so sore a burden have the gods made old age.” “When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream, forthwith this burdensome and hideous old age looms over us hateful and dishonored, which changes the fashion of man’s countenance, marring his sight and his mind with its mist.” Pindar asks why those who must of necessity meet the fate of death should desire “to sit in obscurity vainly brooding through a forgotten old age without sharing a single blessing.” He and Aeschylus take a somewhat less unfavorable view of age, although even Pindar calls it “detested.” Sophocles is the only dramatist who, at least in one passage, welcomes its approach, although there are nowhere bitterer words concerning it than those of the chorus of Œdipus at Coloneus, “That is the final lot of man, even old age, hateful, impotent, unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of evil dwells.” Thus, in general, Greek writers take a very gloomy view of it, never calling it beautiful, peaceful, or mellow, but rather dismal and oppressive. The best they say of it is that it brings wisdom.

R.W. Livingstone52 says: