BOOKS.
Di. OSLER ON OLD AGE.*
Anouz two years ago Dr. Osier, in his valedictory address to the members of the Johns Hopkins University, fluttered. the dovecotes of similar institutions all over the world by suggesting that there should be a time-limit to the labours of academic officials. He called this address by the title of that curious romance in which Anthony Trollope dipped. into the future, and foresaw the establishment of a "fixed period" of life, after which a lethal chamber should await all who were incapable of continuing to do neefnl work. In the preface to the second. edition of his Aeguanimitas, to which this notorious announcement is now appended, Dr. Order reminds us that he did. not expect to be taken quite so seriously as proved to be the case. "To one who had all his life been devoted to old. men, it was not a little distressing to be placarded in a world-wide way as their sworn enemy, and to every man over sixty whose spirit I may have thus unwittingly bruised, I tender my heartfelt regrets." At the same time, he clings to his opinion that the real work of life is done tbefore the fortieth year, and that after the sixtieth year "it would be best for the world and best for themselves if men rested. from their labours." Of course, such a proposition is meant to be taken with a grain of salt. To say that the real work of life is usually done before a man is forty is a statement which will hardly bear the test of serious examination. No doubt it is true in the sense that the formative elements which go to build up a character have done as much as they are capable of doing by the end. of the fourth decade. The old proverb says that a man at forty is either a fool or his own physician, and its obvious meaning may be extended to cover more than the purely physical side of life. If a man of forty does not know what is good for him, what he is capable of doing, and what he must be careful to avoid, he will never know it. But it is, as a rule, after this knowledge has been acquired that the man who owns it really becomes useful to the world. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule ; we have instances of men in whom that intuition which we call genius supplies the place of experience, and we have a Pitt or a Canning, a Clive or a Napoleon, a Keats or a Shelley. Arcola and Pinery, the "Ode to the Nightingale" and the "Prometheus Unbound," the early Administration of Pitt and the speeches by which Macaulay helped to bring about Parliamentary reform, refuse to be brought under the rules of ordinary human development. But it will be generally admitted that there is something exceptional in the cases in which a man's lifework is done before he is forty, and that Dr. Oster is wrong in attempting to prove that this is the rule. It would be just as easy to prove that genius is a plant which flowers late, and that a man cannot add greatly to the sum of human knowledge, or stamp his influence on a nation's destinies, until he is approaching the grand climacteric. Peel was nearly sixty when he gave Free-trade to this country. Bismarck was fifty.six when he established the German Empire, and Moltke had reached the Psalmist's allotted span when he crushed the French armies at Sedan, and so made Bismarck's constructive work possible, • Aegoonhodes. With other Addressee. By ,Wildeto Older. London I B. K. Lewis. [es.] In literature we have "Paradise Lost" and The Tempest, and in music The Messiah, to set against the work of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renovrn" whose premature death the world usually regrets with instinctive refusal of Dr. Osler's theory. The founder of the religion whieh has probably done most to influence the world, after Christianity, was fifty-two at the date of the Hegira, which is commonly accepted as the beginning of his really epoch-making work. If he had died when he was forty, Mohammed would only be remembered by historians of Oriental theology as the preacher of obscure and unreceived doctrines. The two greatest names in English science—or perhaps in all modern science—Newton and Darwin, bear witness against the quadragesimal theory. If they had both died at forty, we should have had neither the Principle nor The Origin of Species, and it is fairly certain that the world would have had to wait much longer than it did for the epoch-making theories of universal gravitation and of organic evolution, the acceptance of which through the genius of their authors went so far to modify our views of the universe and our command over Nature.
Genius, however—whether or not we accept the promising theory which regards it as a manifestation of that subliminal consciousness or over-soul which lies dormant in the average human being—is irreducible to the ordinary rules of psy- chology. The great practical argument against the occasional proposals of medical science to control human physical development by ruthlessly stamping out weaklings in their cradle is that we never know when we should thus be losing a priceless soul. If we examine Dr. Osler's theory with relation to the average man, to whom alone it can safely be applied, we shall find that there is a great deal of sound sense in it, as was, indeed, to be expected from the high reputation of its author. His contention, reduced to plain language, and extricated from that humorous and exaggerated expression which he chose to give to it in the valedictory address which gained so much notoriety in 1905, is simply that it is a disadvantage to human effort, and particularly to that part of it which is expressed in a University, for men to continue working too long. It is notorious that after a certain age the average Professor falls out of touch with the advance of science :— " Irusensibly, in the fifth and sixth decades, there begins to creep over most of us a change, noted physically among other ways in the silvering of the hair and that lessening of elasticity, which impels a man to open rather than to vault a five-barred gate.
And with most of us this physical change has its mental equivalent, not necessarily accompanied by loss of the powers of application or of judgment; on the contrary, often the mind grows clearer and the memory more retentive ; but the change is seen in a weakened receptivity and in an inability to adapt oneself to an altered intellectual environment. It is this loss of mental elasticity which makes men over forty so slow to receive new truths.'
Every one who has studied the way in which revolutionary discoveries have been treated by the academia circles of the day will recognise the importance of this statement. The constant outcry against the "Old Gang" in politics, science, warfare, or literature is a testimony to the veracity of Dr. Osler's theory. Yet it is not very easy to see how the "Old Gang" is ever to be abolished, since to join it is the reward for the work of the rising generation and a constant stimulus to their ambition. The most valuable part of Dr. Osler's insistence upon the sterilising effects of advancing years is that he suggests a remedy for what seems to be an inevitable condition of things. He urged upon his young hearers at Johns Hopkins "the advantages of an early devotion to a peripatetic philosophy of life." Using a metaphor from his biological work, he suggested that metabolism was not suffi- ciently active in the professoriate,—there was not change enough. As at present organised, the average University fails to take the desirability of constant change into account. It is quite obvious that it can only be possible with the consent of those affected : men of science are human after all, and in- security of tenure in the posts which they win as the result of their labours would be fatal to the University which threatened it. Yet it might be possible to devise some system by which the approach of intellectual sterility might thus be staved off for some years. "A well-organised College Trust could arrange a rotation of teachers which would be most stimulating all along the line. We are apt to grow stale and thin mentally if kept too long in the same pasture. Transferred to fresh fields, amid new surroundings and other colleagues, a man gets a fillip which may last for several Tears. Interchange of teachers, national and international, will prove most helpful" Some approach has been made to this desideratum by the establishment of lectureships which bring a famous teacher from his own University to a foreign place of learning for some months at a time—e.g., the Silliman Foundation at Yale, or the Scotch Gifford Lectures—and it is the usual experience that these foundations produce the best results both to teacher and taught. Dr. Osler's own transference to Oxford has already shown advantages of this nature. Perhaps we do not at present make the most of our Professors, and a kind of circulating exchange, if it can be devised by the fertile wits of America, unbound as they are by tradition, should do much to prolong that mental elasticity which is the most valuable safeguard against premature old age.
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