ploying capital. During the immediate process of laying by, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he once strongly recommended fourteen-shilling claret, now, for the working and middle classes, recommends most highly the Post Office savings-banks, and in these the provident of such classes have already deposited nearly three millions of money. It is probable the insurance companies will find themselves obliged to compete with Government in the price they can offer for the poor man's money; but at any rate the poor man will not find any especial difficulty in investing his money if he once acquire the practice which all his best friends, and which prudence, wisdom, and religion itself so urgently recommend, of LAYING BY.

ON THE LENGTH OF OUR DAYS.

HE civilization of to-day is distinguished from that of past ages in nothing more than in the respect it pays to human life. Barbarism is cruel, lavish, and wasteful; semi-civilization often equally so; but when true enlightenment and Christianity step in, the respect paid to the perennial miracle of life is at once marked and established.

Life of any sort, in the very highest or in the very lowest form, is a standing miracle. From the lowest polype, scarcely to be distinguished from a plant, or the vegetable hardly to be separated from a stone, the same miracle is there, acting in higher or in lower degrees. The higher we ascend the greater grows the wonder, the more intense and complicated the marvel. Human life is itself a congeries of miracles. From the bulb of the hair, the brightness of the eye, and the redness of the lip, to the indurated skin upon the sole of the foot, the body of man is indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made." Not only this, but his origin and his growth, to the maturity of the man, is but an extension of the miraculous chain. The pulsation of the heart, the extension of the finger, is each

wonderful: what, then, are the reception of outward nature upon the eye, the growth of thought in the brain, the eloquent language of the tongue? Full of wonders are the Almighty's works. The Caffre or the Earthman, the Caucasian or Mongolian, the criminal or the philanthropist, the ignorant or the philosopher, the peasant or the peer, equally exhibit the miracles we speak of. We are far and away above rank or precedence in this matter: ours is an affair of ganglions and nerves, muscles and bone, flesh and blood; in fact, of life!

Life, being miraculous, is therefore precious. There is, humanly speaking, nothing so shockingly wicked as taking life. Murder comprehends all kinds of sin; and this, whether it be short murder or long murder, quick murder or slow murder ; the murder which is done with an oath, an angry word, and a sudden blow, or the murder which is done by overwork in factories, in close courts, by bad air, by foul feeding, and a thousand of those necessities which, forced upon the human race by society, thin its ranks and shorten to every individual member the length of its days. If the sunshine be a glorious thing, and light and air, blue skies and fair winds, glorious agents in producing health and life in that wonderful materia which lies about us, he who, directly or indirectly, deprives anything of these is guilty of murder. He may do this ignorantly, he may do it without thought, he may totally overlook or utterly deny his moral responsibility, but, nevertheless, he is guilty.

So much for the importance of the subject. We shall now endeavour to show that more knowledge would enable us to

extend the sum of human life, because such knowledge as we have has enabled us to do so already to a great extent. We shall also try to prove that human life is not necessarily short; that its extension depends, under the will of God, very much upon man himself; that if, as we believe it to be, it is good, it is a duty to preserve and increase it.

It is well to follow those scientific men upon whose researches this essay has been built, in the divisions into which they have marked out their subject-Life. Naturally it divides itself into two parts: the first, wherein the body increases in strength and size-infancy and youth; the second, wherein it decreases-manhood and old age: but these again may be subdivided. The first ten years constitute infancy; the second ten, boyhood; the third ten, youth; from thirty to forty, second youth, in which all the illusions of the first two often die out; the first manhood, from forty to fifty-five; the second, from fifty-five to seventy; then comes decay; from seventy-five to eighty is the period of old age, and at eightyfive the second old age commences. These divisions seem to us very reasonable, and we predict that one who lives a life in all things temperate and natural will find these not strongly marked indeed, but insensibly shading into one another. Should any of our readers quote against us the tenth verse of the 90th Psalm, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten," we can only say that in that "song of Moses" the royal psalmist took poetic license. Many of the patriarchs doubled, nay quadrupled, the given period: nay, at that time the sum of life on an average was longer, as

now it is much shorter; and we would further answer, that to make an average fall below, is equally false with making it fall above the truth. If we fix the limit of life at seventy, old age must begin very much earlier than the time at which we have fixed it.

But is there a necessity that human life should end at seventy? History and experience say No. There be many grave seniors as lively at seventy as others are at fifty; many there be stronger and better men. Is there any comparison to be drawn between the lives of the inferior animals and of men, by which we may judge of the average length of our own? Buffon has told us that all the larger animals live about six or seven times the space in which they continue to grow. Others, and those more scientific, following after him, have reduced this to five times the length. But the true data are here found compared and arranged by other writers who have followed Buffon and Cuvier. The length of life is a multiple of the length of growth, thus:-Man grows 20 years, lives 90 or 100; the camel grows 8 years, lives 40; the horse grows 5 years, lives 25; the lion grows 4 years, lives 15 to 20; the ox grows 4 years, lives 15 to 20; the dog grows 2 years, lives 10 to 12; the cat grows 1 year, lives 9 or 10; the hare grows 1 year, lives 8. These figures are given by M. Flourens, who places the proximate multiple at 5.

Thus, by physical analogy, we shall find that man grows for twenty years, and his natural term of life should never be less than one hundred. Great prudence in living, immense strength of constitution, and other circumstances, should