CORRESPONDENCE. 



209 



the various professions; and again, had 

 we these deaths classed according to the 

 distinction which the individuals at- 

 tained. In addition to this it would 

 be necessary to ascertain (with some 

 rough approximation, as I have at- 

 tempted to do with regard to the great- 

 est men of all times) the age at which 

 they had accomplished sufficient work 

 to entitle them to be enrolled in their 

 special class. To take concrete in- 

 stances, let us suppose that we wish to 

 investigate the longevity of American 

 lawyers. Now to be a lawyer in name 

 only requires the candidate to have 

 lived twenty-one years, and the average 

 number of years which the average per- 

 son of twenty-one years of age will con- 

 tinue to live is about forty; so that the 

 mere fact that a man is a lawyer would 

 bring his average age at death up to 

 sixty-one years. I find in MulhalFs 

 Dictionary of Statistics the statement 

 made that the lawyers of Frankfurt die 

 at the average age of fifty-four years, 

 while merchants live to be fifty-seven 

 years old. I know nothing about the 

 authority of these figures, and am using 

 them for illustration only. Assuming 

 all the data to be correct (and twenty- 

 one seems not too high an age for this 

 purpose), this would seem to suggest 

 that the ordinary lawyer of Frankfurt 

 is not favored with abundance of years. 

 In passing, it is interesting to note that 

 these Frankfurt statistics of lawyers 

 and merchants and other classes show 

 a uniformly lower age at death than 

 those of the more eminent representa- 

 tives of their professions. This is just 

 what we should expect; for to be in- 

 cluded in the one group one must have 

 lived only long enough to prepare and 

 establish one's self as a lawyer or as a 

 merchant; while for the other group 

 one must in addition have had oppor- 

 tunity to cultivate one's ability to a 

 riper fruitage, and in a keen, and often 

 long competition gain public recogni- 

 tion. It thus follows that the average 

 longevity of the most distinguished law- 

 yers will be greater than that of ordin- 

 ary lawyers, because it takes longer to 



VOL. LVII.— 14 



enter the more select class. But this 

 argument, like many others, should not 

 be pressed too far; innate ability may 

 accomplish in a brief period what for 

 more moderate powers is the work of 

 many years. Nonetheless, in the study 

 of comparative longevity it is the aver- 

 age that is significant; and it is the 

 fluctuation of the average that we aim 

 to discover. Thus, in the investigation 

 of the longevity of an unwholesome oc- 

 cupation, such as would be accepted by 

 a life insurance company only at special 

 rates, we should expect to find the age 

 at death of such individuals less than 

 that of other classes involving an equal 

 period of apprenticeship; but, of course, 

 not less than that of the 'population as 

 a whole.' And, to continue with the 

 main argument, if we wish to investi- 

 gate the longevity of shoemakers we 

 should again have to decide upon some 

 age at which on the average a person 

 has probably already acquired the dex- 

 terity requisite to be a shoemaker. 

 Even if we fix this so low as ten years, 

 at which time the expectation of life 

 is forty-eight years, it would bring the 

 average age at death of shoemakers to 

 fifty-eight years. It has thus become 

 extremely obvious that if we compared 

 these ages at death with the average 

 life-period it would be just as easy to 

 prove that lawyers and shoemakers and 

 merchants enjoy exceptional longevity, 

 as to prove that great men do. The aver- 

 age longevity is low because of the very 

 large infant mortality, which enters into 

 the composition of this average. When 

 once the first ten years of life are passed 

 the further expectation of life increases 

 quite slowly. Roughly speaking, for 

 every ten years between ten and fifty 

 years the added expectation of life is 

 but three years for each decade. We 

 therefore see that in the very nature 

 of things no one class of adults can pos- 

 sibly live as much as thirty years 

 longer than 'the population as a 

 whole.' The differences with which we 

 are dealing are differences of a finer 

 order, of a small number of years, and 

 being slight differences, must be sub- 



