94 HALL OF FAME MEN. 



know accurately what birth-rank Lyman takes, but we find that 

 David's father, Nathaniel, was born April 7, 1706. This gives a 

 trifle over 69 years and 6 months between Lyman and his grand- 

 father, which period may be divided so as to locate one person in 

 class D and the other in class E. It matters little, as far as our 

 investigation is concerned, at what point the division is made, 

 because there is a total of nearly seventy years, less two periods 

 of growth from infancy to maturity. If the division be made 

 unequally, what is subtracted from one person is added to the other. 

 In such cases as this I have made the divisions nearly equal unless 

 there was some collateral reason for doing otherwise. In the present 

 case we find that Lyman was the son of David's third wife, so that 

 the probabilities are that David was comparatively old when Lyman 

 was born, consequently I have given the higher rank to Lyman. In 

 his autobiography, Lyman Beecher tells us that his father David, 

 though self-taught, was one of the best educated persons in New 

 England, consequently we have another opportunity for use-inherit- 

 ance by a long period of mental activity. Pushing the inquiry 

 further, we find that David's father, Nathaniel, was born when his 

 father Joseph was about 46, and I also find that Joseph was born 

 when his father Isaac was about 38. In thus running back the male 

 line of Henry Ward Beecher's ancestors, we find five successive 

 births from fathers, all of whom had lived considerably more than 

 the average number of years before their sons were born. The 

 result was Henry Ward Beecher, a man whose mental greatness 

 was of such a calibre that he seemed to be able to meet any emer- 

 gency with the easy superiority that characterizes a man who is born 

 with a great brain in contradistinction to one who achieves great- 

 ness only by extraordinary exertions. If it be conceded that there 

 is such a thing as use-inheritance, then this examination into the 



