Dr. George M. Beard, of New York, has delivered lately a lecture on this subject, in which he lays down some propositions in a rather startling form:—

The lecturer began by giving a résumé of papers previously read before the Society, on Young Men in History; an Inquiry into the Relation of Age to Work. He stated that from an analysis of the lives of 1000 representative men in all the great branches of human effort, he had made the discovery that the golden decade was between thirty and forty; the silver between forty and fifty; the brazen between twenty and thirty; the iron between fifty and sixty, and so on. The superiority of youth and middle life over old age in original work appears all the greater when we consider the fact that nearly all the positions of honour, and profit, and prestige—professorships and public stations—and nearly all the money of the world are in the hands of the old. Reputation, like money and prestige, is mainly confined to the old.