GENIUS AND PRECOCITY. 595 



others' inclinations. Sent to read law at sixteen, he managed, after 

 the day's studies, to pursue his astronomical observations, passing 

 whole nights in his favorite occupation. Newton, like Galileo, occu- 

 pied his playhours at school with constructing model machines (water- 

 clock, windmill, etc.). By the age of twenty-three or twenty-four he 

 had conceived roughly his chief epoch-making discoveries. Another 

 English investigator, Thomas Young, was a striking example of pre- 

 cocity. He read with fluency at two. He showed extraordinary 

 avidity of mind in very different directions, now busy mastering the 

 difficulties of Oriental languages, now set on constructing a microscope 

 for himself. His mind, unburdened with its weight of learning, was 

 nimbly tracking out new truths in optics by the age of twenty-nine. 



Recent English biography supplies us with two of the most signal 

 illustrations of the precocity of the mathematical mind, viz., Clerk- 

 Maxwell and Sir William Rowan Hamilton. 



Among naturalists, too, examples of well-marked if less astonish- 

 ing precocity are to be met with. Linnaeus as a boy showed so de- 

 cided a bent to botany that, through the advocacy of a physician who 

 had remarked the early trait, he was saved from the shoemaker's shoj:>, 

 for which his father had destined him, and secured for science. At 

 the age of twenty-three we find him lecturing on botany, and super- 

 intending a botanical garden, and at twenty-eight he begins to publish 

 his new ideas of classification. Cuvier's history is similar. A poor 

 lad, he displayed an irresistible impulse to scientific observation, and 

 by twenty^nine published a work in which the central ideas of his 

 system are set forth. Humboldt, again, showed his special scientific 

 bent as a child. From his love of collecting and labeling plants, 

 shells, and insects, he was known as " the little apothecary." At 

 twenty he published a work giving the results of a scientific journey 

 up the Rhine. In medicine, Haller is a notable instance of precocity. 



Since Science has academical and other appointments to bestow on 

 her distinguished votaries, we may estimate the precocity of scientific 

 men by noting the early age at which such posts have been won. La- 

 place was mathematical teacher at a school when a mere lad ; Lagrange 

 was professor at eighteen ; St. Hilaire at twenty-one ; Kepler, Euler, 

 Linna3us, and Davy at twenty-three ; Cuvier at twenty-six ; Coperni- 

 cus at twenty-seven ; and Tycho Brahe at twenty-eight. Others have 

 obtained academic honors at an early age ; among these, Lavoisier, 

 Lyell, and Clifford. 



Following our general plan, we have to ask what proportion of 

 eminent savants have shown signs of precocity. I find, after going 

 through a list of thirty-six, that twenty-seven, or three fourths, have 

 given distinct evidence of a bent to science before twenty. Of the 

 remaining nine, five appear to have first taken to science after this 

 age, while in the case of four the question is left doubtful. 



Looking now at the age of productivity, we obtain the following 



