Man May Be Made to Live 1,000 Years!

Prof. Virchow's Splendid Vision of a New Race of Methuselahs.

How the Physically Perfect Man Might Be Bred.

Nearly 4,000 Centenarians Now Living in the United States.

Nikola Tesla Says Perfected Men Might Live for Centuries.

All Life Is From a Cell and All Death From Microbes.

The Classic Types of the Sculptors Can Be Surpassed.

Can man be made to live forever?

If, by careful living, men can reach the age of one hundred years, why cannot life be prolonged still further?

Science is holding out the hope that the prophecy of Scripture may be fulfilled — that man's last enemy, Death, may be vanquished and human life be prolonged indefinitely.

The remarkable statements made by Prof. Virchow and Nik

ola Tesla, which are printed on this page, point directly to the possible restoration of the marvellous human age limits recorded in the Old Testament, when the patriarchs, like Methuselah and Noah, lived nearly one thousand years. What man has done in former ages he may do again. He may even transcend it, for man's knowledge of the mechanism of his own body, of its chemical constitution and processes, and of all the diseases that assail it, is incalculably greater now than in the days before the deluge.

Prof. Virchow's recent declaration is startling indeed. He told the International Congress at Moscow a few days ago, in substance that he believed the last secret of life, how to keep life alive and defend it against the assaults of disease effectively and for an indefinite length of time, extending over centuries, would be discovered within the life-time of many members of that Congress.

This is a sublimely grand vision — man storming the mysterious citadel of his own existence, robbing the King of Terrors of his crown, and renewing his youth at will from century to century by the application of his own knowledge of life's inmost secrets.

TESLA SAYS MEN MAY YET LIVE FOR CENTURIES.

"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the latent power fully exists in man to greatly prolong the average length of his life by the exercise of extraordinary care and the proper utilization of the various instruments which science, day by day, is placing at his disposal. A large proportion of the people who die nowadays before reaching what is commonly called old age can trace the cause of their death to the fact that microbes of every kind are allowed by them to enter their bodies through the swallowing of microbe-laden water and food and through the inspiration of microbe-laden air. How many people are really careful today about the water they drink, the food they swallow and the air they breathe? And how many millions of people would be careful if they knew the difference between microbe-laden food and air and those which are really pure?

"Now, instead of whole armies of us plunging into the disgraceful and contemptible task of killing each other in battle, instead of thousands of our master minds spending all their lives in the invention and construction of some terrible machines to kill other human beings, why should not all of us join hands together and shoulder to shoulder turn all our physical and mental energies to killing and warding off all our common enemies and dangers as man? I refer to the perils that are all about us, that threaten us in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we consume.

"Is it not strange and shameful that human beings, creatures in the highest state of development in this world, beings with such immense powers of thought and action, the masters of the globe, should be absolutely at the mercy of our unseen foes, that we should not know whether a swallow of food or drink brings us joy and life or pain and death?

"The economical production of high-frequency currents of electricity, which is now an accomplished fact, enables us to generate easily and in large quantities ozone for the disinfection of the water and the air, while certain novel radiations recently discovered give hope of finding effective remedies against ills of microbic origin which have hitherto withstood all efforts of the physician.

"Let the whole world turn against our real foe — disease. Then, with the certain discovery of hundreds of such secrets as the Roentgen rays in their various forms, and countless other means of detecting the presence of bacilli and microbes in the blood, the disordered conditions of the tissues and vital parts, with the legal intermarriage of only such as are physically perfect down to the smallest detail of tissue, blood and bone, and with the proper observance of the laws of health, it is by no means too much to expect that man can ultimately prolong the average length of his life to one hundred years. I believe we are learning to live more intelligently every year. It is very gratifying, for one thing, to find that children are being brought up more carefully than ever before. I believe that with the most careful scientific marriage a race of men and women may in time be developed in which individuals will live and retain their faculties for centuries."

VIRCHOW BELIEVES THE KEY TO LIFE WILL BE FOUND.

"Life has no other origin than life itself, and this is one of the great truths which the labors of pathologists and biologists of the present century have established beyond the possibility of a doubt. If the life that is taken from life is taken from a highly-developed life so will be the life that is taken. My earnest hope and belief is that the final mystery of life, the key to life, the principle which keeps life alive, will be solved by the biologists and pathologists before all the members of the present Congress are dead." — Prof. Virchow to the International Congress at Moscow, Aug. 19, 1897.

Not only does Virchow declare his belief in the solution of the problem of keeping human life alive by arresting the processes that now destroy it within a little more than thirty-three years, on an average, and within a century at the most, but Tesla indicates how it will be done. The microbe is the enemy to be destroyed. The destruction of the microbe in all its forms is already being planned and plotted for in all the scientific laboratories of the world.

When the detection of all the disease-breeding bacilli is made easy and certain — and that will be done within a few years — Tesla tells us that the rest will be simply the work of each individual man and woman. The intermarriage of the physically perfect will, in Tesla's judgment, provided the perfect types of humanity, thus married observe strictly the laws of health, result in producing a race of men who "will live and retain their faculties for centuries."

That human life may be prolonged very far beyond the limit of years now accepted as usual and inevitable is not indeed a matter of speculation. The average length of human life has already been notably increased within the past thirty years. The death rates of all civilized countries has been going steadily down. Fewer people died per thousand this year in New York City, for example, than died here in 1887. The same is true of London, of Paris, of Berlin and Vienna. Sanitary precautions, health laws, hygienic discoveries of various kinds have done this.

And while the mass of people are living longer on the average, it is remarkable how frequently more than centenarians are reported as having just died in different parts of the world. To live to be one hundred years old is no longer to be distinguished. Especially is the United States a centenarian country. Human century plants are fast becoming commonplace individuals in the land.

4,000 AMERICAN CENTENARIANS.

The census of 1890 disclosed the fact that nearly 4,000 persons were living in the United States, every one of whom was more than one hundred years old. In Massachusetts alone there were, in the ten years ending with 1890, 203 deaths reported of persons who had lived more than a century. That showed the one-hundred-year limit of life to be already attained in that State by one in every 1,900 of its population. Iowa reported 500 persons living in the same year as age above ninety years, and twenty-one persons who had passed their one hundredth birthday.

The British Registrar-General's returns show that in 1891 twenty-one persons were living in London aged upward of one hundred years each. Haller, a famous statistician, collected the figures on this subject for all England a few years ago, and within its boundaries he found authentic records of 1,000 persons who had lived from 100 to 110 years, 60 persons who had scored between 110 and 130 years, 15 who had reached ages from 130 to 140 years, 6 who had attained ages from 140 to 150 years, and 1 person who had actually celebrated the 169th anniversary of his birth.

Already, then, we are living in a time when one hundred years is proved to be an easily attainable age. Provided the candidate for centenarian honors, his constitution observes the rules that prolong life.

What Virchow and Tesla hold out to us as a possible scientific realization of the near future is that, with perfected means for the detection of the slightest assault by their microbic enemies upon the blood and tissues of the human body, and men and women willing to live on strictly hygienic principles and bring children into the world, life may be indefinitely prolonged.

Virchow has declared that all life comes from the cell. No living man has studied more deeply the phenomena of life — its beginning, its growth, its culmination and its final decay and death. John Hunter, his celebrated forerunner in this field of inquiry, closed his researches by saying, "Every living thing comes from an egg." Virchow says: "All life comes from a cell." 

Everything that lives, whether it is a plant, a tree or an animal, begins its life in a cell, and is built up of cells, each separate cell having a distinct life of its own. "I have been able," says Virchow in a lecture before the Royal Society of England, "to demonstrate the existence of cells in those parts where their presence appeared most doubtful — in bone and connective tissues, and have been able to give utterance to the dictum, omnis cellula e cellula, (every little living cell came from a pre-existing, living cell). The cell is the seat and vehicle of disease, the seat and carrier also of individual life. It possesses the property of irritability, and the changes in its substance, providing these do not of themselves destroy life, produce local disease."

From this demonstration it follows that if Virchow's latest prophecy comes true, and the principle of cell life is finally discovered, man will know how to "keep life alive" by reinforcing it with new life, just as a declining life is reinforced with new fuel. The life-time of an approximately perfect human body, bred from previously approximately perfect human organizations, may then be extended, at first from periods of from twenty to fifty years, beyond the 100 years already frequently attained.

Then, as the careful reproduction of approximately perfect men and women proceeds, each successive generation will approach more nearly to perfection — with sounder vital organs, purer blood, stronger bones, and a physical equipment in every respect more durable.

In this way the perfected men and women of the coming age, foreseen by Virchow and Tesla, will be born with a much longer lease of life to begin with — built to live 150 years.

Assume that these perfected types of human life avoid all disease-inducing habits and practices, live temperately in all things, make no drafts of folly on their stock of vital energy, and call to the protection of life all the resources of the latest scientific discoveries. Koch and his school have shown how all malignant disease proceeds from bacilli. Diphtheria, typhus, cholera, the plague, consumption and all the other dragons that destroy human life are simply so many species of bacilli.

THE NEW SEARCHLIGHT.

The X-ray permits the inmost secrets of the body to be uncovered. With its aid the first appearance of the assailing microbe will be easily signalled. Under its searching light the earliest symptom of functional disturbance will be apparent. And every physician knows that men die by thousands daily simply because their internal maladies were not discovered in time to make resistance successful.

"All life is from a cell," cries Virchow. "All death is from a bacillus," cries Koch. To discover how the life principle of the cell may be fed and renewed is one-half of the problem of making men live three, four, five or ten times as many years as they do now, Virchow believes that half of it will be solved within the lives of many men now living.

The other half of the problem is how to detect and destroy the attacking bacillus and thus baffle death. And half of that half-problem is already solved. Those who are familiar with the results reached by expert horticulturists in the perfecting of plants by careful selection of seeds, so that marvellously beautiful flowers have been at length evolved from continually improving growths, will easily believe that whenever men and women in any considerable number choose to enter the marriage relation with the studied purpose of producing more perfect types of humanity, startling results will be gained. If they and their children and their children's children shall continue to blend the science of health with the sentiment of love, the result, in the course of time, would surely be the appearance of a distinctly higher and nobler order of men and women of such splendid stature and perfectly proportioned bodies as would surpass the loftiest conceptions of human strength, symmetry of limb and beauty, of face, which the sculptor's inspired chisel has embodied in the marbled gods.

POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENTIFIC PARENTAGE.

The lesson of the scientific methods of stock raising by which cows and sheep, stronger, larger-limbed and longer-lived that our fathers ever saw, and horses capable of speed performances such as they would have said were beyond the bounds of possibility, are all hints in the same direction.

To state the problem in arithmetical shape: If Thomas Parr lived 152 years, his lifetime stretching across three centuries, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth, in an age that was unsanitary and unscientific, when the hundred and one aids to long life and defenses against disease and death which are at our service to-day were unknown and undreamed of, how long might a human life of strength originally equal to Parr's, derived from several generations of constantly perfecting human types, be made to last, when Virchow's promise has been realized and the principle of reinforcing life has been discovered on the one hand, and Koch's promise of Immunity from microbes has been fulfilled on the other?

Height .................. 5 ft. 6 inches.
Girth of neck .......... 13 inches.
Width of shoulders ..... 14 inches.
Fullest of ch'st between the arms .. 30 inches.
Width of waist at smallest ........ 19 inches.
Front width of leg just above the knee ........ 4 inches.
Girth of calf .......... 14 inches.
Length of foot .......... 9 inches.
Width of foot at joint .......... 3 inches.
Front width of ankle .......... 2 inches.
Weight ................. 140 pounds.

Clearly, if Parr, in the darkness and ignorance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the days of the Great Plague, when pestilence stalked the earth unchallenged, was able to achieve 152 years, the perfected man of the twentieth century of light and science may be expected to easily reach 200 years, and advance by natural stages of improvement, until the man who lives 300 years will be no more celebrated than Thomas Parr is now.

SULLIVAN'S DEFECT AS A PHYSICAL MODEL.

The process of improving the human type by reproducing it from the most perfect types, the improved types in their turn peopling the world with yet more nearly perfect types, will have as its natural starting point the most ideal type of the physical man of which we now have knowledge.

This is a matter of proportionate measurements, which the authorities on the human form have definitely laid down. The figure of the most ideal man yet developed — a foreshadowing of the perfected man who is coming — is shown on this page. It is adapted from the famous statue of "The Boxer," by the sculptor Donoghue. It was modelled, as to the body, from John L. Sullivan in his best form. But the legs are not those of Sullivan.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who inspected Sullivan about that time, and whose anatomical learning was second to that of no man of his time, pronounced him to be a model of form — except as to his legs. They were too small. The legs were modelled, strange to say, from those of a bantam-weight boxer, who weighed sixty pounds less than Sullivan — Johnny Murphy — long known as Harvard's favorite boxing instructor.

IDEAL MEASUREMENTS.

The measurements of Corbett at twenty-seven years of age may be cited as those of one of the approximately best human physiques living to-day. Standing 6 feet 1 inch in his bare feet, he weighed 185 pounds. His neck measured 17 inches, his chest 38 inches, expanding to 42 1/4 inches; his waist 33 inches, his thighs 21 inches, his calves 14 1/4 inches, his arms outstretched gave 6 feet 2 inches from finger-tips to finger-tips; his biceps measured 14 1/2 inches, his forearm 11 1/2 inches, his wrist 6 1/4 inches; his glove size was 8, his hat size 7 1/4 and his shoe size 8. Yet he was not precisely, proportioned.

It is doubtful if any man living exactly meets all the measurements that make a perfectly proportioned man. Somewhere in his make-up there is a defect, a surplus inch or an inch lacking. We shall have to wait for the perfectly proportioned man until the visions of Virchow and Koch and Tesla are all fulfilled, and the production of higher types from high types, and higher yet from the higher thus created, and so on, has culminated in the man and woman filled with health, proof against disease, of exactly proportionate measurements, and possessing the secret of keeping life alive, fitted to live for four or five centuries.

Height .................. 6 ft. 2 inches.
Girth of chest .......... 46 inches.
Length of waist .......... 17 inches.
Length of upper arm .... 17 inches.
Length of thigh .......... 21 inches.
Girth of calf .......... 18 inches.
Length of arm .......... 29 inches.
Weight ................. 190 pounds.

THE LATEST ANTI-GERM DISCOVERIES.

Within the past fortnight two new scientific appliances have been announced which will make it easier for the coming man to grow proof against microbes and measure his years by hundreds. Dr. Robert Xavier Giering, of Baltimore, has found a way of using X-rays to obtain photographic pictures, not merely of the bones of the body, but of every tissue in the body, in detail — all its muscles, interior organs, blood vessels and nerves. No symptom of disease can evade this photographic test. Dr. Robert L. Watkins, of this city, at the same time announces the invention of what he calls the micromotoscope. With this instrument, the combination of the microscope and the vitascope, the presence of any bacilli in the blood can, he asserts, be unerringly detected. Such inventions herald the age when disease will not be cured, but prevented.

Dr. Howard Lilienthal, of No. 873 Madison Avenue, consulting physician to Mount Sinai Hospital, discussing Virchow's prophecy says: "Any new apparatus or method which will enable physicians to discover the presence of curable diseases earlier than the present methods do, will undoubtedly result in the prolongation of human life. Still, it is rather too early to decide the amount of good done to medicine by the newly announced apparatus of Dr. Glering, of Baltimore, and Dr. Watkins, of this city. We should wait a little to see if they are really practical. I do believe, however, that it is only a question of a few years when science will place in the hands of man appliances like the X ray which will enable him to prolong his own life for no inconsiderable period.

"Only last week I was reading a book of Gould's and was simply astounded to find in its pages a long list of men and women who had been known by the author to have lived to the ages of 150 and 175 years. Certainly if the people mentioned by Gould could live to the age of 175 without the aid of such scientific appliances as the X ray it is only reasonable to expect that others can live just as long, if not longer, if they have placed in their hands the apparatus without number which are sure to be discovered in the years to come.

"It will no doubt surprise the world at large to learn that Virchow, the greatest living authority on all medical matters, and who is President of the International Association of Surgeons, which has just concluded its big congress at Moscow, is reported by the Medical Record to have said in his address to that body that he firmly believes the time will come when man will learn the key to prolonging life, and that he (Virchow) is inclined to believe that as soon as the twentieth century that one great secret of life will be laid bare by the men of science."

WHAT DR. CYRUS EDSON THINKS.

Dr. Cyrus Edson says: "While I believe that microbes are not such an unmixed evil. In that they serve to kill out the physically and mentally weak, I believe, nevertheless, that the discovery of such appliances as those attributed to Giering and Watkins, if they can ever become practical, will be the means of lengthening human life enormously.

"I think that Tesla goes to rather an extreme and looks too far into the future when he says that men can ultimately live so long, but I do believe, also, that in a few generations a large number of appliances will be discovered, each of which, doing its little share, will serve to place it within man's reach, to lengthen his life by fifty years, or even more. But when I say this, I want it understood that the appliances can serve to lengthen the lives of those only, and those others, who will devote themselves from the beginning to a strictly temperate, abstemious, and hygienic life. The vices which are now so common.

"Even at the present day any physician can enormously lengthen the life of any physically perfect man who will agree to abstain entirely from intemperate and vicious habits. The difficulty is to find the man who is willing to sacrifice his inclination for vice to his mere wish to live a long life. But, given a man and woman who are willing to devote themselves to such purely hygienic lives, and whom these appliances show to be minutely physically and mentally perfect, their offspring will be healthier than the average man, and consequently longer lived."

A WOMAN PHYSICIAN'S THOUGHT.

Dr. Donohue, the clever woman physician-director of the New York Hospital for Women, at No. 213 West Fifty-fourth street, and who is a daughter of the late celebrated athlete, Capt. Donohue, of Newburg, says:

"The mere discovery of these various appliances like the X-rays, and those of Drs. Giering and Watkins, if they are practical, will unquestionably give the medical man better opportunity of locating and diagnosing diseases of all kinds. But these discoveries for the locating of diseases will not in themselves so materially serve to lengthen human life. If we will set to work and, after perfecting apparatus to detect disease in such obscure and little known places, invent means of curing the diseases we have so cleverly located, then unquestionably the man who leads a temperate, non-vicious life can prolong that life indefinitely.

"If we could make it possible to allow only the intermarriage of such persons as are shown by these means to be really physically perfect, down to the smallest detail of tissue and blood, then it is more than likely that by ages and ages of breeding men who led hygienic lives, descended from physically perfect men who had also led hygienic lives, we might produce a race that might live double, treble and possibly a hundredfold more years than the average man of this present time."

E. D. Foote, M. D., of No. 130 Lexington avenue, who is the author of several well-known works of medical interest, says: "I certainly agree with Mr. Tesla when he says that human life can ultimately be prolonged indefinitely. For the past fifty years all of our large cities have been devoting enormous sums of money to the construction of proper drainage and other public sanitation, and, as everybody now knows, the death-rate in our large cities at the present day is strikingly smaller than it ever has been in all medical history.

"This shows conclusively that man has the power within him to prolong his own life. If it were possible to have fifteen or twenty generations of men live strictly temperate lives, with the total abandonment of vicious habits, and abstinence from coffee, tea, tobacco and alcohol, together with the marriage of only such women as the newest appliances of X-rays and other scientific discoveries would show to be physically perfect, even to the absence of microbes of any disease in the blood and tissues, then I believe that the last man of the line would compare favorably in age with Methuselah and the other famous old men of Biblical tradition. The trouble will be to find the men to live such purely scientifically perfect lives."

DR. KUHN BELIEVES IT.

Dr. F. W. Kuhn, head surgeon of the Eastern District Hospital, Brooklyn, says: "Man's life is rendered extinct when the germs and microbes in his body succeed in getting the upper hand. If man can utilize science in locating these germs and killing them off, unquestionably even the men of our own generation can prolong their own lives by number of years.

"If the old men of Biblical note could live for such long years I do not see any good reason why men of the present and the centuries to come could not live a great deal longer than sixty, eighty or ninety years. While, of course, microbes existed in the time of Methuselah and the other patriarchs, I believe that their number was so infinitesimally small that men were entirely free from contamination by them, and thus were able to live to such great ages. But with the continual increase in the number of microbes and the consequent increase of the number swallowed by man in his food, water and the air he breathes, the more desperate has been the battle of his vital parts with these hostile germs, and consequently the earlier has been his consignment to the grave. Invent appliances to destroy these myriads of microbes and you invent means to prolong man's life, and the more thorough the character of the appliances invented the more nearly will the men of the future approach in age the years of the patriarchs the Bible tells about."

These opinions of representative physicians show that Virchow's and Tesla's prophecies of a coming race that will possess the secret of renewing life, defying disease and living through many centuries well within the bounds of possibility.