Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.
Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
literature, almost without exception, have lived long.
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