Senescence, the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • G. Stanley Hall
Date:
1922
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Senescence, the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Thus the decade from 30 to 39 shows only very slightly greater productivity than the next one, and less than one-half made good, so far as public recognition is con¬ cerned, before the age of 40. This is irrespective of vocation. In all the studies of genius3 it would seem that musicians do their best work earliest and prodigies are most common in this field. In those callings that require a long preparation, science promises earliest recognition because this line of work is entered with better intel¬ lectual equipment. Here, too, belong professors, libra¬ rians, and teachers. Next come actors and authors, in whom ability is partly born and partty made. Compared with science, inventive genius gains a foothold on the ladder of fame late in life. The business man and finan¬ cier, the lawyer, doctor, and minister, must often enter their profession from the bottom, and almost no great inventor is below forty. For woman, however, recogni¬ tion comes earlier, and attractiveness of person has a greater premium here than with her brother. Having outlived her youth, however, progress is harder. W. A. Newman Dorland 4 studied the histories of four hundred great men of modern times and concluded that they refute Osier's theory, the large majority of them being still active at sixty, although he distinguishes between workers and thinkers. He tells us that only that which is fittest survives and almost seems to imply that man became man when he was able to live and work productively after 40.5 He considers old age one of the choicest products of evolution. His painstaking article is divided into three sections: (1) enumerating the great things done by men after 70; (2) by those between 60 and 70; (3) by those between 50 and 60. He thinks *“Age and Eminence,” Pop. Sci. Mo., vol. 66, 1904-05, p. 538. *The Age of Mental Virility, The Century Co., 1908. ‘“What the World Might Have Missed,” Century, 1908, p. 113, et seq.
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