Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/612

608 excitable constitutions, who are destined to early death, but that the remainder consists of men likely to enjoy a vigorous old age." Our cases are so few that we can not lay stress on these periods as being particularly precarious in the case of eminent women.

In spite of the fact that in a number of instances the data are too meager to be reliable, it seemed worth while to compute the average age of the eminent women for the different centuries. For the first two centuries after Christ I have only three cases each, but these tend to show that in this remote period, eminent women died early. The martyr's block has left its record in the third century, the average, based on seven cases, being only 28.2 years. Saint Helena escaped a violent death and lived to be 77. If her case were excluded, the average age for the century would be 20.1 years. During the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries the average length of life seems to have been longer. For the remainder of the Middle Ages the figures are so meager as to render them valueless, but from the fourteenth century the numbers are sufficiently large to at least represent a tendency. The average age at death in the case of eminent women of the fourteenth century was 48.7 years; in the fifteenth century, 49.3 years; in the sixteenth century, 49.8 years; in the seventeenth century the average was increased to 60.6 years; in the eighteenth century it was 64.1 years; in the nineteenth century, 62.7 years. This, however, is not a final figure for those of this century who are to be the longest lived and who will tend to increase this average arc yet living. It is probable that these