May 2, 1887.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



147 



or are killed and eaten. In the long result variations give 

 rise to new .species. 



The only assumption at the base of Darwin's theory is 

 that sufficient time has elapsed since the beginning of life 

 for the development of all past and present species of plants 

 and animal.s from a common ancestry. As to the age of 

 the earth, more especially as a fit and possible abode of life, 

 geologists and physicists are not agreed. The geological 

 estimate rests chiefly upon the rates at which the deposit of 

 sediment, or the wearing away of soil by rain and rivers, 

 are going on ; but that estimate is based upon the assump- 

 tion that present changes are the measure of past changes, 

 whereas uniform action does not exclude the possibility of 

 great and sudden revolutions. But, on the whole, the 

 argument from geological evidence is strongly in favoui- of 

 the lapse of not much less than one hundred million years 

 since the earliest life-forms appeared and the oldest stratified 

 rocks began to be laid down. This is much longer than the 

 physicists, reasoning from the origin and age of the sun's 

 heat, the rate of the earth's cooling, and other data, are 

 willing to allow. But, however the question may be finally 

 settled, the result cannot aflect the evidence in support of 

 the theory of descent which is supplied by the facts — 1, of 

 Embryology, or likeness of beginnings ; 2, of Morphology, 

 or likeness of structure ; 3, of Classification of plants and 

 animals ; and -1, of their Distribution both in space and 

 time. 



WILD YOUTH'S TAX ON LIFE/^ 



By Henry Ward Beecher. 



j LD age has the foundation of its joy or its 

 foiTow laid in youth. Every stone laid in 

 the foundation takes hold of every stone in 

 the wall up to the very eaves of the build- 

 ing : and every deed, right or wrong, that 

 transpires in youth reaches forward, and has 

 a relation to all the afterpart of man's life. 

 A man .^ lite i.^ not like the contiguous cells in a bee's honey- 

 comb : it is more like the separate parts of a plant which 

 unfolds out of itself, every part bearing relation to all that 

 antecede. That which one does in youth is the root, and all 

 the afterparts, middle age and old age, are the bi-anches and 

 the fruits, whose character the root will determine. 



E\ery man belongs to an economy in which he has a right 

 to calculate, or his friends for him, on eighty years as a fair 

 term of life. His body is placed in a world adapted to 

 nourish and protect it. Nature is congenial. There are 

 elements enough of mischief in it if a man pleases to find 

 them out. A man can wear his body out as quickly as he 

 please^-;, destroy it if he will, but, after all, the great laws of 

 nature are nourishing laws, and, comprehensively regarded, 

 nature is the universal nurse, the universal physician of our 

 race, guarding us against evil, warning us of it by incipient 

 pains, setting up signals of danger, not outwardly, but 

 inwardly, and cautioning us by sorrows and by pains for our 

 benefit. Every immoderate draft which is made by the 

 appetites and pa.ssions is so much sent forward to be cashed 

 in old age. \Ye may sin at one end, but God takes it ofTat 

 the other. Every man has stored up for him some eight}' 

 years, if he knows how to keep them, and those eighty years, 

 like a bank of deposit, are full of treasures ; but youth, 

 through ignorance or through immoderate passions, is wont 

 continually to draw cheques on old age. Men do not sup- 



* This article was written by Beecher only a fortnight before 

 his death. It was probably hi.s last contribution to periodical 

 literature. 



pose that they are doing it, although told that the wicked 

 shall not live out half their days. 



Men are accustomed to look upon the excesses of youth 

 as something tliat belongs to that time. They say that of 

 course the young, like colts unbridled, will disport them- 

 selves. There is no harm in colts disporting themselves, 

 but a colt never gets drunk. I do not object to any amount 

 of gaiety or vivacity that lies within the bounds of reason 

 or of health ; but I do reject and abhor, as worthy to be 

 stigmatised as dishonourable and unmanly, every such 

 course in youth as takes away strength, vigour, and purity 

 from old age. I do not telieve that any man should take 

 the candle of his old age and light it by the vices of his 

 youth. Every man that transcends nature's laws in youth 

 is taking beforehand those treasures that are stored up for 

 his old age ; he is taking the food that should have been his 

 sustenance in old age, and exhausting it in riotous living in 

 his youth. Mere gaiety and exhilaration are wholesome : 

 they violate no law, moral or physical. 



I do not object to mirth or gaiety, but I do object to any 

 man's making an animal of himself by living for the gratifi- 

 cation of his own animal passions. People frequently think 

 that to require in the conduct of youth that which we ex- 

 pect in later life has something of Puritanism in it. Men 

 have an impression that youth is very much like wine — 

 crude and insipid until it has fermented, but when it has 

 fermented, and thrown down the lees, and the scum has 

 been drawn ofl', the gre;it body between is sound and whole- 

 some and beautiful. I am not one that thinks so. 1 think 

 that youth is the beginning of the plant life, and that every 

 wart or excrescence is so much enfeeblement of its fruit- 

 bearing power. I do not believe that any man is the better 

 for ha^•ing learned the whole career of drunkenness or of 

 lust, or the dallyings or indulgences that belong to a morbid 

 life. A young man who has gone through these things may 

 be saved at last, but in after life he has not the sensibility 

 nor the purity nor the moral stamina that he ought to have. 

 He has gone through an experience but for which his man- 

 hood woidd have been stronger and nobler. I thoroughly 

 disbelieve that a man is any better for having in his ^-outh 

 passed through an experience that developed his animal 

 nature and his lustful appetites. Excess in youth, in regard 

 to animal indulgence, is bankruptcy in old age. 



For this reason I deprecate late hours, irregular hours, or 

 irregular sleep. People ask me frequently, " Do you think 

 there is any harm in dancing ! " No, I do not. There is 

 much good in it. " Do you, then, object to dancing 

 parties?" No; in themselves I do not. But where 

 unknit youth, unripe muscle, unsettled and unhardened 

 nerves are put through an excess of excitement, treated 

 with stimulants, fed irregularly and with unwholesome food, 

 surrounded with gaiety which is excessive and which is pro- 

 tracted through hours when they should be asleep, I object, 

 not because of the dancing, but because of the dissipation. 

 It is taking the time that unquestionably was intended for 

 sleep, and spending it in the highest state of exhilaration 

 and excitement. The harm is not in the dancing itself : for 

 if they danced as do the peaiaints, in the open air, upon the 

 grass under the trees, and in the day, it might be com- 

 mended, not as virtuous, but still belonging to those 

 negative things that may be lieautiful. But the wassail in 

 the night, the wastefulness — I will not say of precarious 

 hours, for hours are not half so precarious as nerves are — 

 the dissipation, continued night after night and week after 

 week through the whole season, it is this I deprecate as eat- 

 ing out the very life. I am not superstitious of observances, 

 but I am always thankful that there are forty days of Lent 

 in the year when folks can rest from their debauches and 

 dissipations ; when no round of excessive excitement in the 



