that he will ever find an antidote to disease; that he will search out some recuperative agency stronger than the law of decay, and that will hold the human system in the perpetual vigor, and bloom, and beauty of maturity.  I will not assert that science will, at last, be carried to such perfection, that there shall be no more infirmities of age; that the pestilence will be stayed from walking in the darkness, and destruction from wasting at noonday; that men will cease to grow old, save in years, or that death will be compelled to seek its victims only through the channel of accidents, against which forecast will not, and science has no opportunity to guard.  What I mean to say is, that I do not KNOW that just such results are beyond the capabilities of human progress.  Measuring the future by the past, I cannot demonstrate that such results may not one day be attained.”

“The good time of which you speak,” said the Doctor, “when there shall be no more infirmity of age, no growing old, save in years; when there shall be no wasting by disease, through the perfectability of the curative science, or the discovery of some recuperative agency, stronger than the law of decay, will never come.  When it is granted, as an abstract proposition, that the capabilities of science are sufficient to counteract the mere wasting influence of time upon the human system, you are met by a great practical fact which will overturn your theory.  The excesses of the world are a much more fruitful source of disease and death than the attritions of age.  There is a constant struggle on the part of nature to build up and beautify, to strengthen and recuperate, against the results of human excesses.  Not one in a million of those who pass away every year, die from the effects of age, as a primary cause.  Hence, you must not only perfect science, but you must perfect the morals and the habits of the human family, before you can exempt them from decay and death.  The instincts of men, the appetencies which they possess in common with the whole animal creation, are each made the source of disease, and premature decay.  Some men eat too much; some drink too much; some sleep too much; some waste their vital energies in sensual indulgence, while all have some vicious habit (I mean with reference to the preservation of life), known or unknown to the world, which, sooner or later, undermines the constitution, and helps on the work of dilapidation.  These excesses will always exist; they are inherent in the human constitution, resulting from the very nature of man; they are an inevitable sequence of his physical structure, and his intellectual life.  To avoid them implies absolute perfectability in every attribute, and that makes him a god.  Until man shall have become infinite in wisdom, as well as immaculate in purity, he will continue to indulge, to a greater or less extent, in excesses of some sort, and those excesses will always be an overmatch, when superadded to the natural law of decay, for the recuperative