They should be your
strength."
The young Americans of talent and promise--there is our strength, and a
noble company they are! We do not ask from what college, or what state,
or what church they come; but what do they know, and what can they do,
and what do they want to find out.
In the biographies of eminent scholars, it is curious to observe how
many indicated in youth preeminent ability. Isaac Casaubon, whose name
in the sixteenth century shed lustre on the learned circles of Geneva,
Montpellier, Paris, London and Oxford, began as professor of Greek, at
the age of twenty-two; and Heinsius, his Leyden contemporary, at
eighteen. It was at the age of twenty-eight, that Linnaeus first
published his _Systema Naturae_. Cuvier was appointed a professor in
Paris at twenty-six, and, a few months later, a member of the
Institute. James Kent, the great commentator on American law, began his
lectures in Columbia College at the age of thirty-one. Henry was not far
from thirty years of age when he made his world-renowned researches in
electro-magnetism; and Dana's great work on mineralogy was first
published before he was twenty-five years old, and about four years
after he graduated at New Haven. Look at the Harvard lists:--Everett was
appointed Professor of Greek at twenty-one; Benjamin Peirce, of
Mathematics at twenty-four; and Agassiz was not yet forty when he came
to this country.
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