below—"since last year!" insidiously intimating that in another year or so you will have nearly as fine a chest as Heenan! And you, poor deluded victim, are more than half willing to believe that your increasing size is an equivalent to increasing health and strength, especially as your wife emphatically takes that view, and regards your augmenting portliness with approval. Ten years have now passed away since you were forty, and by weight twelve stone and a half a fair proportion for your height and build. Now you turn the scale to one stone more, every ounce of which is fat; extra weight to be carried through all the labors of life. If you continue your present dietary and habits, and live five or seven years more, the burden of fat will be doubled; and that insinuating tailor will be still congratulating you. Meantime you are "running the race of life"—a figure of speech less appropriate to you at the present moment than it formerly was—handicapped by a weight which makes active movement difficult, upstair ascents troublesome, respiration thick and panting. Not one man in fifty lives to a good old age in this condition. The typical man of eighty or ninety years, still retaining a respectable amount of energy of body and mind, is lean and spare, and lives on slender rations. Neither your heart nor your lungs can act easily and healthily, being oppressed by the gradually gathering fat around. And this because you continue to eat and drink as you did, or even more luxuriously than you did, when youth and activity disposed of that moiety of food which was consumed over and above what the body required for sustenance. Such is the import of that balance of unexpended aliment which your tailor and your foolish friends admire, and the gradual disappearance of which, should you recover your senses and diminish it, they will still deplore, half frightening you back to your old habits again by saying, "You are growing thin: what can be the matter with you?" Insane and mischievous delusion!
It is interesting to observe that the principle I have thus endeavored to illustrate and support, little as it is in accordance with the precept and practice of modern authority, was clearly enunciated so long ago as the sixteenth century. The writings of Luigi Cornaro, who was born of noble family in Venice soon after the middle of the fifteenth century, and was contemporary for seventy years with Titian, wrote his first essay on the subject of regimen and diet for the aged when eighty-three years of age, producing three others during the subsequent twelve years.[1] His object was to show that, with increasing age and diminished powers, a corresponding decrease in the quantity
- ↑ "Discorsi delta Vita Solria, del Signor Luigi Cornaro." An English edition, with translation, was published by Benjamin White, at Horace's Head, in Fleet Street, London, 1768. Cornaro's first work was published in Padua in 1658. In his last, a letter written to Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia, he gives a description of his health and vigor when ninety-five years old. A paper in the "Spectator" was one of the first notices of him in this country. See vol. iii, No. 195.
