early inhabitants of Southern California, according to the statement
of Mr. H. H. Bancroft and other reports, were found to be living in
Spartan conditions as to temperance and training, and in a highly moral
condition, in consequence of which they had uncommon physical endurance
and contempt for luxury. This training in abstinence and hardship, with
temperance in diet, combined with the climate to produce the astonishing
longevity to be found here. Contrary to the customs of most other tribes
of Indians, their aged were the care of the community. Dr. W. A. Winder,
of San Diego, is quoted as saying that in a visit to El Cajon Valley
some thirty years ago he was taken to a house in which the aged persons
were cared for. There were half a dozen who had reached an extreme age.
Some were unable to move, their bony frame being seemingly anchylosed.
They were old, wrinkled, and blear-eyed; their skin was hanging in
leathery folds about their withered limbs; some had hair as white as
snow, and had seen some seven-score of years; others, still able to
crawl, but so aged as to be unable to stand, went slowly about on their
hands and knees, their limbs being attenuated and withered. The organs
of special sense had in many nearly lost all activity some generations
back. Some had lost the use of their limbs for more than a decade or a
generation; but the organs of life and the "great sympathetic" still
kept up their automatic functions, not recognizing the fact, and
surprisingly indifferent to it, that the rest of the body had ceased to
be of any use a generation or more in the past. And it is remarked that
"these thoracic and abdominal organs and their physiological action
being kept alive and active, as it were, against time, and the silent
and unconscious functional activity of the great sympathetic and its
ganglia, show a tenacity of the animal tissues to hold on to life that
is phenomenal."

[Illustration: A TYPICAL GARDEN, NEAR SANTA ANA.]

I have no space to enter upon the nature of the testimony upon which the
age of certain Indians hereafter referred to is based. It is such as to
satisfy Dr. Remondino, Dr. Edward Palmer, long connected with the
Agricultural Department of the Smithsonian Institution, and Father A. D.
Ubach, who has religious charge of the Indians in this region. These
Indians were not migratory; they lived within certain limits, and were
known to each other. The missions established by the Franciscan friars