The habits of indulgence in alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, and other narcotics or stimulants, have less to do than is generally supposed with longevity, but much to do with happiness, while their abuse or irregularity determines all for health, happiness, and longevity combined. Temperance men and moralists will take issue with me, and undertake to prove that any quantity, no matter how small, of either alcohol, tobacco, or opium will shorten life; but the facts will not sustain the assertion. It is the irregularity with which the body is treated, either by outward application or bathing, in eating, sleeping, or excess in all vices. For health, a regular gratification in the full list of vices is better than having no vices--such as are so termed by the world--and being irregular in everything else. While I do not believe in practising any form of vice, yet the man who takes six drinks of alcoholic spirits in reasonable quantities at fixed intervals each day, smokes six cigars--two after each meal--chews three ounces of tobacco with the same punctuality every day, eats his meals slowly and at stated periods, sleeps from 8-1/2 to 9 hours per night between the same hours, will outlive the man who neither smokes, chews, or drinks, but does eat and sleep irregularly, and lies awake all night hating his neighbor for his immoralities. He gets thin and haggard, followed by all the weaknesses to which his system is heir; while the other man, with his evenness of nature, habits, and dissipations, enjoys health, becomes fat, and lives to the proverbial good old age. Here, then, my reader, we have the explanation why a man may live through _dissipation_ all his life, and then die only by accident at 80 or 100 years of age. A beggar, miser, or hermit may by degrees contract the habit of filthiness, non-bathing, scantiness of food and improper clothing, with such regularity that he will outlive all his friends and relatives, and be chronicled at his death as one of the _centenarians_. As an interesting fact, we state that in 1888 a beggar, aged 84, in Perth, Hungary, tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Danube because he was no longer able to support his father and mother, who were 115 and 110 years old respectively! _Poisons_ may be taken in infinitesimal doses for a while, then increasing by degrees until _twenty_ grains of morphia or strychnia may be taken at a single dose without immediate injury. There is at least one case of positive record in Colusa County, of this State.