The correspondence on the secret of long life has provoked
a characteristic and delightful explosion from Sir George Birdwood in Monday's Times. He is profoundly sceptical as to all royal roads to extreme longevity, regarding its attain- ment as a questionable achievement nuless it is desirable in the interests of others. It is nonsense to generalize from prescriptions which suit individual cases. His oldest and healthiest acquaintance, " one of the sanest and best of men," drank a bottle of the best cognac every day of his life, and mirabile dicta was always the better for it. Sir George Birdwood continues :-
"I attribute my senility—let others say senectitude—to a certain playful devilry of spirit, a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the India Office on a bilked pension I swore by all the gods I would make up for it by living on ten years, instead of one, which was all an insurance office told me I was worth. The devil in me has avenged me; and I am now going, quite sportfully, to live on to eighty-four, because that age, chaurasi, among Hindus, constitutes one a beatus for evermore —however big a blackguard you may have been. As for the prescription of lying in bed until noonday, I would rather be some monstrous flat fish at the bottom of the Atlantic than accept human life on such terms."
Sir George Birdwood does not believe in overwork as an enemy to health but in over-eating. But " the sovereign prescription for health is to think of it as little as possible."
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