LONGEVITY AND BRAIN-WORK.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 240, 17 March 1875, Page 4

LONGEVITY AND BRAIN-WORK.

(From the Spectator .) Dr Beard, of New York, whose interesting paper on the relative creative power of youth and age respectively we noticed in our issue of the 21st March, has just written another paper in some respects of still higher general interest, on “ The Longevity of Brainworkers.” It takes as his text —if a text may he what it now often is, the embodiment of the theory which the writer intends to refute rather than to assume or sustain—a saying of Mr Thomas Hughes’s, that “ the world’s hardest workers and noblest benefactors have seldom been long-lived;” and the object of the paper is to show, on the contrary, that the world’s hardest workers and noblest benefactors would, if their ages at death could be all ascertained, show at least a very high average of life—a much higher average than the world’s drones, and those who had not added anything to its accumulated capital of happiness, knowledge, goodness, and truth. On the whole, Dr Beard proves his case, but he proves it only on the supposition that the term “ hardest workers” and “ noblest benefactors” is somewhat liberally interpreted. Indeed, if, as we suppose, Mr Hughes were referring to the case of King Alfred the Great—in the story of whose life it occurs—when he made the remark against which Dr Beard has taken trouble to protest so elaborately, it was obvious that what he did mean was rather that lives, otherwise likely to be long, are shortened by the moral, pressure of any intense strain, than that great men of this high calibre die absolutely young, for Alfred himself was 52, or nearly 52, when he died, and that is, according to Dr Beard, two years above the average age of all who pass the age of twenty. So that Mr Hughes was probably only speaking of long life in that stronger sense in which we should use the words in reference to a life already conspicuously useful—which it rarely is till it has passed considerably the time of youth, In fact, Dr Beard’s paper, properly read, rather supports than overthrows the view that the hardest work and the noblest endeavor will generally tend to shorten the life which those who spend themselves in this way might otherwise have lived. For Dr Beard himself shows that, as a rule, a brain of exceptional force goes with a constitution of exceptionally good fibre, so that quite apart from the work actually done, the class in any way competent to do it must show a much higher average of life than ordinary men. It would be probably very easy to show that, as a rule, the best carpenters’ tools last the longest time, as well as do the greatest amount of work. But it would not in the least follow from that that the unsparing use of them does not tend to wear them out much sooner than a more sparing use. They last longer than poorer tools, because they are better to begin with. But the same metal and the same tempering being assumed, unquestionably the tools used sparingly—only enough to keep them in working-order —would last much longer than those unsparingly used, And so it is probably with human brains, Men who do groat things

must, as a rule, have stronger brains, to begin with, than men of average calibre. If, then, they live a good deal beyond the average, it is because they have robust constitutions which would naturally give them a life much beyond the average. Not the less is it most improbable that those who are “ the world’s hardest workers and noblest benefactors ” can live to the ago to which they might well have lived had they husbanded thr'f strength more carefully, and not expended themselves so lavishly in the regeneration of the world. To take a few instances almost at haphazard;—Luther died at 63; St Francis de Sales, at 55; John Howard, at 63; Elizabeth Fry, at 65; Cromwell, at 59; Whitelield, at 56; Wesley, at 87; Lacordaire, at 59; Maurice, at 67; John Stuart Mill, at 66; and hardly any of them, except perhaps of Mill and Wesley, can it be said with any probability, on a review of their lives, that they might not have materially lengthened their days by economising more carefully their expenditure of moral and intellectual energy; nay, that they did not substantially shorten them by a lavish and exhausting use of their moral power. But then, to do what they did they must have been men of more than ordinary constitutional strength, and the proper question to ask about their longevity is not whether they lived beyond the average age of men who pass the age of 20, but whether they did not materially shorten their life by the intensity of their work. Dr Beard virtually concedes this point when he tells us that “worry is the converse of work; the one develops force, the other checks its development and wastes what already exists.” But worry is an almost necessary incident of really highpressure work. If men do not feel sure that they can do in the time the work appointed for the time, worry is inevitable. Nay, if men have a higher ideal of the kind of work they ought to do than they can adequately realise, it is hardly possible to doubt that it must involve a considerable amount of worry as well as of work; and that worry, as Dr Beard himself contends, will probably have shortened a life, that without it might have been longer. Indeed, Dr Beard virtually shows that it is not the most exhausting work which really is most favorable to length of life, when he produces the American clergy as the class whose average life is the longest. That is in itself a proof that it is moderate rather than exhausting and high-pressure brain-work which is most favorable to length of life. At least, if we may judge of the American clergy by our own, it would be generally admitted that the clerical profession is that in which the brain-work is in fair, and not more than fair, proportion to the bodily activity, and not, on the average, likely to be excessive. Indeed, it cannot well be contended that there is anything exceptional in the mental wear and tear of the American as distinguished from the English clergy, for Dr Beard quotes confirmatory statistics from the investigations of a Berlin physician. That investigation gives the following results —results, suppose, assuming that the professional persons on whom the average is taken to have passed maturity:—that the average of clergymen is 65 ; that of merchants, 62 ; clerks and farmers, 61 ; military men, 59; lawyers, 58; artists, 57; and medical men, 56. In America, apparently, the average length of life seems somewhat lower, but the relative length is much the same; while in England Dr Beard appears to think that the average age of medical men is a good deal higher than in the United States. No doubt the moral restraints upon the clergy tend to raise the average duration of their lives, but the comparatively harmonious development given to their physical, intellectual, moral, and emotional life—in all countries at least where the clergy are not celibate —no doubt has, more than any other cause, to do with the relatively high average of their life. Had Dr Beard been able to give us statistics of any value about journalists and those who really live by exciting literary work, we suspect he would have found that the life rate was about the lowest on his list, and hardly above that of the highly skilled manual laborers. Dr Beard even maintains that precocity of development, so far from being premonitory of early death, is almost always a mark of great talents, and usually, therefore, of the constitutional strength of brain which accompanies great talents. A Mr Winterburn, who had investigated two hundred and thirteen cases of the age of acknowledged musical prodigies, found that their average age at the time of death was 58, “ while some attained the age of 103.” But Dr Beard has more solid facts to go upon than that. He himself had examined the age attained by five hundred of the most eminent men in history, including many who. like Eaphael, Pascal, Mozart, Byron, and Keats, died young, and he found the average age of these five hundred eminent men to be 64 years and between two and three mouths. But of these, about one hundred and fifty were decidedly precocious. Now, of these precocious geniuses, the average age at the time of death was 66 and six months, —in other words, more than two years higher than the average of the whole five hundred, and three years higher than that of the 450 who were not precocious. This seems to show that the phrase “too clever to live ” is a completely erroneous one. Great talent is pretty sure to give early proof of its existence, and so far from showing that the physical vitality must have prematurely passed into the nerves, this precocious capacity is a mere natural indication of the centre and seat of special power. Hence it would seem that not only is brainwork no hindrance to longevity, but precocious brain-work is no hindrance to longevity, so long as it is easy and does not strain the mind. We may be quite sure that if “worry” is so destructive to health ns Dr Beard thinks, premature worry is still more so, and that all hard tasking of a child’s capacities must be mischievous, though their spontaneous working can hardly be anything but healthy and beneficial.