It would be interesting to know if a more critical study of the actual age of many of these and other quoted centenarians would substantiate their claims. No such investigation, however, has ever been made into the many cases reported by this and the preceding author. I append a few special records that seem peculiarly challenging. The first is that of James L. Smith,[83] a veteran of the Civil War. Twenty years ago he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, was warned against excitement, and his friends and physician were horrified when he proceeded to run his flesh off. It was a great effort for so heavy a man but in six months he had reduced his weight to one hundred and ninety and was running more than six miles a day, his daily work being the directing of two hundred district messengers. Yielding to the protests of his friends he ceased his exercise, because he was told that he could not punish his heart and lungs thus and not suffer and was liable to drop dead. Growing fleshy again, with increased shortness of breath, he began to run again daily, reducing his weight once more to a hundred and sixty and developing a physique and complexion like that of a far younger man. At seventy he ran never less than five and often ten miles a day, holding that senility is a disease of the mind and that youth and its vigor can be maintained if one only believes in himself. He has raced in many parts of the country and has a standing offer to run any ten survivors of the Civil War in relays of one to a mile, he himself running the whole ten. His offer used to be accepted; it is so no longer. The day he was seventy he “covered a half mile faster than a roller-skating champion,” and at seventy-three ran half a mile in 2 minutes and 44 seconds. On a dirt road he has run ten miles in 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds, exactly the same time in which he ran the same distance in the Grand Army marathon at Los Angeles six years before, and says that he finished in fine condition.