THE year 1910 opens with the brightest prospect for human progress ever offered in the world's history. The moral tone is steadily advancing, and with it we have a hitherto unknown increase in longevity. The superstitions of the past, both medical and religious, are fast giving place to a scientific discernment of the facts of being, and theories which do not make for progress are no longer accepted on the ground of their authority. As of old, "there be many that say. Who will show us any good?" and what is more, there are also very many who pray as did the psalmist, "Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us."
A very interesting article, by a physician, appeared recently in the Detroit (Mich.) Journal, with the caption, "The Century Mark is Probable." It begins with the statement that "ere the present century has passed away the common age for man will not be the seventieth mile-stone of the psalmist, but the one hundredth, and this as a mark to the progress and discoveries now being made in the arts, hygienic and medical." The writer goes on to say that the pessimistic belief of a certain physician, to the effect that sixty years was the limit of one's usefulness, "has been left far behind already, through the piling up of thousands of cases of a virile life of usefulness a score of years beyond this limit." The writer also says that the average lifetime of civilized man has been advanced within the last quarter of a century from thirty-three to forty-three years, and that indications are all in favor of a still farther advance.
It might here be asked if the reputed age of the antediluvians would not soon be reached, were conditions to improve, as they must if mankind avail themselves of the best within their reach, their advancement increasing in the ratio of the unfoldment of their higher capabilities. The writer quotes Bacon, where he says, "I have hope, and wish that the nobler sort of physicians will advance their thoughts, and not employ their time wholly in the sordidness of cures; neither be honored for necessity only; but that they will become coadjutors and instruments of the divine omnipotence and clemency in prolonging and renewing the life of man."
