and of Rush’s notion, who imputes to the aged such an augmenting love of life that he is at a loss to account for it, and suggests, quaintly enough, that it may depend upon custom, the great moulder of our desires and propensities; and that the infirm and decrepit “love to live on because they have acquired a habit of living.” His assumption is wrong in point of fact. He loses sight of the important principle that Old Age is a relative term, and that one man may be more superannuated, farther advanced in natural decay at sixty, than another at one hundred years. Parr might well rejoice at being alive, and exult in the prospect of continuing to live, at one hundred and thirty, being capable, as is affirmed, even of the enjoyment of sexual life at that age; but he who has had his “three sufficient warnings,” who is deaf, lame and blind; who, like the monk of the Escurial, has lost all his cotemporaries, and is condemned to hopeless solitude, and oppressed with the consciousness of dependence and imbecility, must look on Death not as a curse, but a refuge. Of one hundred and thirty-three suicides occurring in Geneva from 1825 to 1834, more than half were above fifty years of age; thirty-four, from fifty to sixty; nineteen, from sixty to seventy; nine, from seventy to eighty; three, from eighty to ninety; in all sixty-five. The mean term of life in that city being about thirty-five to forty, this bears an immense proportion to the actual population above fifty, and exhibits forcibly an opposite condition of feeling to that alleged by Rush, a weariness of living, a desire to die, rather than an anxiety, or even willingness to live. I once knew an old man of about one hundred and four who retained many of his faculties. He could read ordinary print without glasses, walked firmly, rode well, and could even leap with some agility. When I last parted with him, I wished him twenty years more; upon which he grasped my hand closely, and declared he would not let me go until I had retracted or reversed the prayer. Strolling with my venerable and esteemed colleague, Prof. Stephen Elliott, one afternoon, through a field on the banks of the river Ashley, we came upon a negro basking in the sun, the most ancient-looking personage I have ever seen. Our attempts, with his aid, to calculate his age, were of course conjectural; but we were satisfied that he was far above one hundred. Bald, toothless, nearly blind, bent almost horizontally, and scarcely capable of locomotion, he was absolutely alone in the world, living by permission upon a place, from which the generation to which his master and fellow-servants belonged had long since disappeared. He expressed many an earnest wish for death, and declared, emphatically, that he “was afraid God Almighty had forgotten him.”