174 SEX 



First, science, both as simpler and more 

 obviously concerned with the much-respected 

 equipment of knowledge; and for our own 

 science of biology recall the " grand old men," 

 second surely to none in history Darwin, 

 Wallace and Hooker so lately with us, Haeckel 

 and Weismann happily still here. Records 

 of adolescent distinctions in the ordinary 

 sense are not much evident the very absence 

 of them much more so 1 But these, like all 

 true naturalists, were boy-naturalists, having 

 acquired the essential feeling of their subject 

 in early years before adolescence, and escaping 

 conventional instruction at least, till they 

 were mature enough to take it for themselves. 



So conspicuously it is and has been with 

 the great artists who have attained long life. 

 They remain great to the end ; and this we 

 believe, so far as we can read their biography, 

 is in association with early aptitude and effort, 

 and adolescent choice and opportunity in 

 developing it ; whereas (and here is an essential 

 point) our secondary artists and scientists 

 are not necessarily secondary, but largely 

 those who have been more or less starved of 

 their proper opportunities in childhood and in 

 adolescence; and who have thus begun to 

 learn too late, after the adolescent growth 

 and plasticity had been wasted and stiffened, in 

 our conventional but for them irrelevant ways. 



Moreover, generalising such biographies yet 

 further, though, after efforts even late begun, 

 considerable or even high productivity may 

 be obtained during the age of maturity, this 

 tends to go off with the first or second decline 

 of vigour of sex, as with the advent of the 



