66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



If this is not a very decisive result to reach, there is another less 

 recognized method of educational develo]3ment which occurs so fre- 

 quently that I am disposed to attach very decided significance to it. 

 I refer to residence in a foreign country during early life. The emi- 

 nent persons under consideration have indeed spent a very large por- 

 tion of their whole lives ahroad, whether from inclination, duty or 

 necessity (persecution or exile), and it might he interesting to note the 

 average period of life spent by a British man of genius in his own 

 country. I have not attempted to do this, but I have invariably noted 

 the eases in which a lengthened stay abroad has occurred during the 

 formative years of childhood or youth. I have seldom knowingly in- 

 cluded any period of less than a year; in a few cases I have included 

 lengthened stays abroad which were made about the age of thirty, but 

 in these cases those periods of foreign residence exerted an unques- 

 tionable formative influence. I have excluded soldiers and sailors alto- 

 gether, for in their case absence from England at a very early age has 

 been an almost invariable and inevitable incident of their lives, and has 

 not always been of a kind conducive to intellectual development. Nor 

 have I included the very numerous cases in which transference from 

 one part of the British Islands to another has sufficed to exert a stimu- 

 lating influence of the greatest importance. With these exceptions, we 

 find that as many as 322 of the eminent persons on our list (or about 

 40 per cent.) during early life, and in all but a few cases before the 

 age of thirty, have spent abroad periods which range from about a year, 

 and in very many cases have extended over seven years, up to extreme 

 cases, like that of Caxton, who went to Bruges in early life and stayed 

 there for thirty years; or Buchanan, who went to France at the age of 

 fourteen and was abroad for nearly forty years. It is natural that 

 France should be the country most frequently mentioned as the place 

 of residence, but France is closely followed by other countries, and a 

 familiarity with many lands, including even very remote and scarcely 

 accessible countries, is often indicated. It may further be noted that 

 this tendency to an association between high intellectual ability and 

 early familiarity with foreign lands is by no means a comparatively re- 

 cent tendency. It exists from the first; the earliest personage on our 

 list, St. Patrick, was kidnapped in Scotland at the age of sixteen, and 

 conveyed over to Ireland; it seems, indeed, that in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury the tendency became less marked, in face of the average modern 

 Englishman's hasty and unprofitable method of traveling. In any case, 

 however, it is evident that there has been a very marked tendency 

 among these men of preeminent ability to familiarize themselves in the 

 most serious spirit with every aspect of nature and life. It is equally 

 marked among the men of every group, among poets and statesmen, 

 artists and divines. It is not least marked in the case of men of sci- 



