210 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the ordinary relationships of life, while excessive shyness really be- 

 trays also a feebleness of the emotional impulse. Even in many cases 

 in which marriage occurs, it is often easy to see that the relationship 

 was rooted in the man's intellectual passion.* 



The average age of marriage among the men in our list, taking one 

 hundred cases, is found to be thirty-one years, the most frequent age 

 being from twenty-eight to thirty-two inclusive. Of these, four were 

 under twenty, and thirteen over forty at the date of their first mar- 

 riage. This proportion of late marriages is abnormally high, espe- 

 cially when we remember that the marriages of widowers are here 

 excluded. The proportion of early marriages is somewhat low, as 

 compared with the general population in England to-day. The, average 

 age, thirty-one years, is distinctly late, more especially when we re- 

 member that it only includes first marriages. The average age of 

 marriage for all males during recent years in England is between 

 twenty-eight and twenty-nine years, and at the other side of the world, 

 in ISTew Zealand, though later, it is still below thirty. The most fre- 

 quent age of marriage also falls much earlier. In estimating the sig- 

 nificance of these figures as regards men of genius, we have to remem- 

 ber, on the one hand, that the well-to-do classes, to which men of pre- 

 eminent intellectual ability largely belong, marry later than the general 

 population, and, on the other hand, that the general tendency to marry 

 late is of recent growth. If we are entitled to believe that these con- 

 flicting tendencies balance each other, the data still indicate that 

 British men of genius have shown a tendency not only to marry seldom, 

 but to marry late. 



The married women on our list form too small a group to gen- 

 eralize about vath safety. One notable fact, however, emerges. They 

 show a tendency to marry either before or after the period at which 

 the majority of married women marry, but not during that period. 

 In England during recent years the average age at which women marry 

 has been about twenty-six years. But among British women of genius 

 very few marriages take place during the period of gi-eat reproductive 

 energy; the large majority of such marriages fall outside the period 

 between twenty-three and thirty-four years of age. In the majority 

 of cases marriage took place before this period, the relationship, from 

 one reason or another, being very often dissolved not long afterwards; 

 but in a very considerable proportion of cases, marriage never took 



* Dr. P. Garnier ('Celibat et Celibataires,' pp. 72-.5) has some interesting re- 

 marks on this point. He considers that genius is, or should be, celibate, and that 

 a man of genius is not usually able to make a woman's life happy. He mentions 

 that among the eighty-four professors at the medical faculties of Paris, Lyons 

 and Bordeaux — the three chief medical centers of France — fifteen are celibates, 

 and of the sixty-nine who are married eleven are childless. 



