CHAPTER III 



THE DURATION OF YOUTH IN MAMMALS 



I ENTERED the University of Aberdeen a few weeks before I was 

 sixteen years old, and it pleased me to find that most of those in 

 my class were several years older. Kind relatives endeavoured to 

 chasten my pride by telling me of various distinguished professors 

 who had joined when they were only twelve or thirteen years 

 of age. As I had not then learned the folly of meeting the reproofs 

 of my elders with rational arguments, I replied by saying that in 

 those prehistoric days University education was on a lower grade, 

 and that students matriculated before they had begun to learn Greek 

 or Mathematics. And I have no doubt but that to-day many of 

 the first year's courses at the Universities begin where we left off. 

 So also it is with most of the pursuits of life. In business, in handi- 

 crafts, and in professions the period of education (in the common 

 sense of the word) is growing longer, and youths are older when they 

 emerge from the pupillary stage. But although they are older 

 in years, I do not think that they are physically older. They retain 

 the flexibility, the high spirits, the sense of irresponsibility, and 

 many of the purely physical characters of youth, such as practical 

 indifference to the other sex, for a longer time. In the civilised 

 races and especially in the more intellectual classes, the some- 

 what indefinite transition from youth to manhood does not 

 occur till after the age of twenty. There is a parallel change in the 

 case of women. Our grandmothers were married and became the 

 responsible heads of establishments at ages of thirteen, fourteen, or 

 fifteen years, an arrangement which would be regarded as scandalous 

 to-day. The transition from boyhood to manhood or from girlhood 

 to womanhood, using these somewhat indefinite terms in the widest 

 sense, comes later. No doubt there are racial differences as well 

 as differences of civilisation and of class, and in the case of Europe 

 the long-headed, dark-skinned peoples along the northern shore of 

 the Mediterranean, although they may be equally civilised, mature 

 at rather earlier ages than the round-headed peoples of Central 



37 



