Byron C. Utecht[82] thinks the day is dawning when one hundred and fifty years will be the usual span of life. He gives many statistics to show that the average age is slowly increasing, particularly in Switzerland, where in the sixteenth century it was 21.2 years whereas in the nineteenth it was 39.7. He quotes Finkenberg of Bonn, who concludes that “the average length of life in Europe in the sixteenth century was 18 years and now it is 40,” the average in India being now about 23.6 years as against 19, two hundred years ago. These figures, it should be noted, however, are little more than conjectural. Utecht, like Colonel Smith, has collected data about many people who have reached the age of 100, some of whom he photographs. He believes man not only lives longer but is more vital than formerly. He seems to accept without proof that a Montana Indian lived to be 134; an Oregon woman, 120; and a Mrs. Kilcrease of Texas, 136. He tells us of one Arkansas woman who reached 112 years, keeping a large garden almost to the end of her life, who at the above age walked six miles and back to see her great-great-granddaughter married. She claimed her age was due to clean, honest living, plenty of work, a desire to help, keeping busy, and caring for others. A. Goodwin of Alabama (106) walks five miles a day and works several hours in his garden. He eats what he likes, reads without glasses, and is the head of one of the largest families in the country, their reunions being attended by more than eight hundred persons. He had been a hunter and still uses his rifle and ascribes his longevity to interest in out-of-door sports as a young man. He has been so busy he can hardly realize he is old, wants fifty years more of life if possible and feels that he is going to have it. He has been temperate, sleeps much and regularly, and has a horror of worry. Mrs. Mary Harrison of Michigan celebrated her hundredth anniversary and did not seem as tired as any of her two hundred guests. She had been a humorist and would never look on the dark side of things. An Ohio lady of 91 who has been devoted to a motorcycle cannot bring herself to give up her joyrides, although she now has a young man to guide the wheel. She has always lived in the country and worked hard and ascribes her longevity chiefly to her rides. Utecht has collected perhaps two-score more instances of people well over ninety and concludes that all of them were, in their prime, more or less athletic--at least none were weaklings. He thinks the longest-lived people are average men and women who have a good hygienic sense. None were intemperate, few were highly educated, and most were inured to hardships and even drudgery in youth, so that the study of all their lives practically tells the same story of simple life in the free air, with enough but not too much work and with exemption, for the most part, from worry.