Montana labor news., 1938-04-28
MiratIes Not Required
To Be a C~enienarian

"Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall eas to
%palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty,
Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and ST.
monides
Bore off the prize Of verse from his
compeers,
When each had numbered more than
four score years;
And Theophrastus, at four score and
ten,
Had but begun his Characters of
Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock, with the
nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales.
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years
were past.
These are indeed exceptions, but
they show
How far the gulf stream Of our youth
may flow
Into the Arctic regions of our lives
Where little else than life itself sur
vices"
-Longfellow.
The world pauses for a moment,
in its hurry, to wonder and exclaim
when out Of obscurity some infre-
quent centenarian is featured in the
news. Man has learned to fly; to
converse across great space; even
the ether waves are subjugated to
his will. Only long life eludes the
popular grasp, and to live a hundred
years or more is still nigh unto a
miracle.
But need this be so? Must we
wait for the discovery of some magic
draught or godly elixir to prolong
life? Men of science tell us that a
healthy babe at birth has within it
the potentiality for living at least
a hundred years, and even longer.
Evidently, some time between birth
and earlier death, some false steps
were taken, some fatal errors made
some poisonous injuries committed
There is at the Rockefeller. Insti-
tute today some protoplasm from the
heart of an embryonic chicken which
has been kept in a special incubator
since 1912 when the renowned DR.
Alexis Carrel started the expert
ment. This heart is nourished will
a balance ration of all the elements
required by the chicken and regu
larly the toxins (poisons) are
drained off. And so long as thu
blood supplied to it is kept pure, ST
long as it receives the right nourish
ment and thorough cleansing, thu
chicken heart will never diel
This, then, is our lesson: to keel
the bloodstream so clean, SO free 0
toxins, in other words, so pure, tina
it will keep our hearts and bodie
young. For our bloodstream is veril
the fountain Of life and of youth
The blood reaches into every livin
part of the body; to each cell
brings the protein food with whic
to renew it and the fuel food to b
burned by it, as well as the re
corpuscles that are the carriers {
oxygen and the white corpuscle
which protect the body from geri
invasion and multiply SO miraculou!
ly when disease begins its ravage
And when the cells have combine
fuel and oxygen to give heat an
energy to the body, when they hav
renewed themselves with proteil
the bloodstream carries the wast
products out to the various channe
of elimination.
It is true that no diet has as "
been devised, no way Of living con
pleted, so sensitively attuned to Il
individual requirements that deaf
can be forever postponed, but the.
past years have marked great strid,
forward toward giving us Il
: knowledge of the elements Of di
? and way of living that can best keC
8 the blcodstream free of toxic poisol
. that life may be prolonged to Il
century mark under the condition
Of life which our civilization If
poses. But not, 1 hasten to add,
/ prolongation of senility and deca
- the accepted handmaidens of agil
people, but a prolongation Of yout
and a middle-age Of health al
mental alertness finally merging in
the last days Of life.
I Perhaps no better example c.
= be found today Of mental and ply.
t cal fitness than the %crusading Upt
! Sinclair, still writing, still fighti
the battle for humanity, as vital I
day as twenty or more years az
Has he accomplished this on t
American diet of meat-white bre
mashed potatoes-gravy-coffee
pie twice a day? No; this man bu
v good health upon the foundation
a sickly childhood after experimel
ing with all extremists in diet,
evolving a simple diet replete