The Arizona sentinel., 1896-06-13
NUMBER 30.
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Longevity of Animals.

The Literary Digest translates the foll' wing from the Journal q. Hygiene; Man lives to all ages, but in the anil mai kingdom, on the contrary, the duration of life is almost exactly equal for all individuals of the same species. But we can know with ex- actness the real duration of life only for animals in servitude; we do not know whether it is the same in the savage state. Rabbits and guinea pigs live years; squirrels and hares, &; cats, or 10; dogs, 10 or 12; foxes. 14 to 16; cattle, 15 to IS; bears and wolves, 20 the rhinoceros, 25; the ass and the horse, 25 to 30; the lion, 30 to 40 Ca lion in the London Geological Gardens reached the age of 70 years); the camel, 40. The length of life of the elephant is uncei tain; according to Aristotle, Buffon, and Cuyier, it lives two centuries; some authors say even four or five. After his victory over Porus, Alexander consecrated to the sun an elephant that had fought for the Indian monarch, and gave it the name of Ajax; then, having att tached an inscription to it, he set it at liberty; the animal was found $50 years later. The ancients attributed to the stag a fabulous length of life. but Aristotle observes that what is re- ported on this subject has no good foundation. Buffon says that the stag takes or 6 years to attain full growth and should live seven times this period, that is, 8 or 40 years.
 Though precise ob servations are wanting, we know that fishes, es- pecially the large species, live very long time According to Bacon, cells reach 60 years. Carps have been known to live at least 150 years, and they then seemed to Buffon as lively and agile as ordinary carp. Dolphins, surgeons, and sharks live more than a century and attain huge size. Pikes have been seen weighing 1000 pounds. which indicates very long existence. A pike caught at Kaisers-Lautern in 1497 was 19 feet long and weighed $50 pounds it bore in it's gills a copper ring with an inscription stating that it had been put in the pond ot Lautern by order of the Emperor Frederick IT., that is 261 years before. Whale fishers have exterminated the huge whales of the polar seas; those that were formerly met with were of prodigious dimensions. It is supp posed, with some probability, that they live several centuries and that they may even reach an age of 1000 years.
 On the other hand, we meet another class of animals whose passions are lively, whose vitality is very active, and who still live a long time-we mean birds. But 1t is not known with any degree of precision how long these live, except that their longevity is great. We see the same swallows returning to their accustomed nest | for considerable number of years. An eagle died at Vienna at the age ot | 1O3 years. According to Bufon, the life, of the crow is 10S years, and no observation authorizes us to attribute to it, with Hesiod, 1000 years. A paroquet, brought to Florence in l633 by the Princess Provere d'Urbip, when she went there to espouse the i Grand Duke Ferdinand, was then at | least 20 years old and lived nearly 100 more. A naturalist whose testi- mony cannot be doubted, Willoughby. had certain proof that goose lived & century; and Buffon did not hesitate to conclude that the swans life is longer yet; some authors gave it two and even three centuries. MallertOn possessed the skeleton of swan that had lived 307 years. This is quite enough to prove that among the larger animals, and also especially among birds, the duration of life, relatively to their bulk and height, is very longi it is, on the contrary, very short with insets; many of these live less than a month, rarely few years, while the life of the epher1erids is but ' to 12 hours, and in this brief space they &C., complish the principal functions that nature acquires of organized bodies thnv are horn renrnduce and die.