"What Produces Death.--Someone says that few men die of age. Almost all persons die of disappointment, personal, mental, or bodily toil, or accident. The passions kill men sometimes even suddenly. The common expression, 'choked with passion,' has little exaggeration in it, for even though not suddenly fatal, strong passions shorten life. Strong-bodied men often die young; weak men live longer than the strong, for the strong use their strength and the weak have none to use. The latter take care of themselves, the former do not. As it is with the body, so it is with the mind and temper. The strong are apt to break, or, like the candle, run; the weak burn out. The inferior animals, which live temperate lives, have generally their prescribed term of years. The horse lives 25 years, the ox 15 or 20, the lion about 20, the hog 10 or 12, the rabbit 8, the guinea-pig 6 or 7. The numbers all bear proportion to the time the animal takes to grow to its full size. But man, of all animals, is one that seldom comes up to the average. He ought to live a hundred years, according to the physiological law, for five times 20 are 100; but instead of that he scarcely reaches an average of four times the growing period. The reason is obvious--man is not only the most irregular and most intemperate, but the most laborious and hard-working of all animals. He is always the most irritable of all animals, and there is reason to believe, though we cannot tell what an animal secretly feels, that more than any other animal man cherishes wrath to keep it warm, and consumes himself with the fire of his own reflections." Provided you have babies in your family go through the following and see if you can't train your child so it shall be among the last seventeen mentioned:-- "Take your pencil and follow me, while we figure on what will happen to the 1,000,000 of babies that will have been born in the last 1,000,000 seconds. "I believe that is about the average--'one every time the clock ticks.' "One year hence, if statistics don't belie us, we will have lost 150,000 of these little 'prides of the household.' "A year later 53,000 more will be keeping company with those that have gone before. "At the end of the third year we find that 22,000 more have dropped by the wayside. "The fourth year they have become rugged little darlings, not nearly so susceptible to infantile diseases, only 8,000 having succumbed to the rigors imposed by the master. "By the time they have arrived at the age of twelve years but a paltry few hundred leave the track each year. "After threescore years have come and gone we find less trouble in counting the army with which we started in the fall of 1889.