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Hereditary Genius
265
conditions of life must have varied in the periods to which they refer.
Out of the 196, nearly half of them die between the ages of 55 and
75; one quarter die before 55, and one quarter after 75: 62 or 63 is
the average age at death, in the sense that as many die before that
age as after it. This is rather less than I have deduced from the other
groups of eminent men treated of in this volume. Dod, the most aged
of all of the Divines, lived till he was 98. Nowell and Du Moulin died
between 90 and 95; and Zanchius, Beza, and Conant, between 85 and
90. The diseases that killed them are chiefly those due to a sedentary
life, for, if we exclude the martyrs, one quarter of all the recorded
cases were from the stone or strangury, between which diseases the
doctors did not then satisfactorily discriminate; indeed, they murdered
Bishop Wilkins by mistaking the one for the other. There are five
cases of plague, and the rest consist of the following groups in pretty
equal proportions, viz. fever and ague, lung disease, brain attacks, and
unclassed diseases.
As regards health, the constitutions of most of the divines were
remarkably bad. It is, I find, very common among scholars to have
been infirm in youth, whence, partly from inaptitude to join with other
boys in their amusements, and partly from unhealthy inactivity of the
brain, they take eagerly to bookish pursuits. Speaking broadly, there
are three eventualities to these young students. They die young; or
they strengthen as they grow, retaining their tastes and enabled to
indulge them with sustained energy; or they live on in a sickly way.
The Divines are largely recruited from the sickly portion of these
adults. There is an air of invalidism about most religious biographies,
that also seems to me to pervade, to some degree, the lives in
Middleton's collection.
He especially notices the following fourteen or fifteen cases of
weak constitution:—
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