KEEPING UP WITH METHUSELAH

The day when guns will be melted into tractor plows is not yet in sight; but the time has arrived when poison gas is put to constructive use. The army chemists have joined the ranks of those scientists who are endeavoring; by taking thought, to add a year to man's three score and ten. They have discovered curative properties in chlorine, mustard gas and lewisite.

Chlorine was found to be a preventative for pneumonia and influenza when it was noticed that men working in the army laboratory where there was a trace of chlorine in the air seemed immune from the prevalent epidemic of those diseases. Lewisite has been used in direct experiment with good results upon persons inflicted with locomotor ataxia. The much abused guinea pig was cured of a severe attack of tuberculosis by inhaling a very small quantity of the burning mustard gas.

The same animal was used by a German doctor who has announced the discovery of an antitoxsin for fatigue. Some of this fatigue medicine quietly sprayed in a class room so increased the energy of the pupils that at the end of one lesson they called for another.

But it is not only for disease and weariness that new remedies are being found. Science has discovered a new drug which it believes will raise the dead. Adrenalin, as the drug is called, was given as a heart stimulant in a vain atempt to save the life of President McKinley; and recently injected directly into a heart which had stopped, it restored the customary beating.

It is now a great distinction to remain active at eighty and the centenarian overlords us all. But such supremacy will be seriously questioned by a horde of modern Methuselahs if one can ward off the most incurable diseases with poison gas, be revivified in one's failing years with fatigue antitoxsin, and be kept alive to see the turn of the tenth century with adrenalin.