AMONG THE BENJAMINS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 14769, 23 September 1921, Page 2

AMONG THE BENJAMINS.

YOUNGER CHILDREN USUALLY THE CLEVEREST. Mr Bernard Shaw recently suggested in these columns (says "John o' London's Weekly), that the genius of Nthe family is apt to be found among the younger children, although he hastened to add that he was not convinced that all geniuses are Benjamins. Mr Shaw is justified by the facts Dante was the son of a second wife. Shakespeare was not the eldest of his famity. Walter Scott was the ninth of twelve children; Tennyson was a fourth child; Victor Hugo was the youngest son. ERASMUS AND WESLEY. Rembrandt was a fourth son, Constable a second son. Bach was a younger son, Handel was the son of a second marriage. Mozart .was a younger child, and Beethoven had an elder brother who died in infancy. Erasmus had an elder brother, Calvin was a second son, St. Ignatius Loyala, the founder of the Order of Jesuits, was the youngest of a famity of thirteen, and John Wesley was the fifteenth child. Bacon was a youngest son. So was Descartes. Spinoza was the child of

of second marriage. David Hume was a youngest child. Montaigne was a third son, and Voltaire a fifth Darwin was the younger of two sons, and the fourth child, and Huxley was the seventh child of a seventh child, which perhaps accounts for his good luck. Richelieu was a third son, and Cromwell a fifth son. The younger Pitt was the second son of the first Earl of Chatham, who was also a younger son, Wellington a fourth son and Nelson was a younger child. So was Marlborough. DICKENS AND TOLSTOI. Benjamin Franklin was a tenth son, Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children, and James Watt was a younger child. Dickens was a

second child, Tolstoi was the fourth of five children, Bismarck was a younger child. Balzac had an elder ' sister. The Earl of Beaconsfield was a second child. Among living people Mr. Lloyd George is an elder son. The Hon. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, is a second son. Foeh is the second son of a family of four. Field-Mar- • shal Haig is a younger son. Edison is a fourth child, Sir Edward Elgar had an elder brother, and Lord Haldane is a fourth son.-. On the other hand, Goethe was the eldest of his family. So were Shelley, Keats and Browning. Cardinal Newman was an eldest son. So were Gibbon, Carlyle, Galileo, Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and Linnaeus. Isaac iNewton was an only son. Columbus was an eldest son. Thackeray and Burne-Jones weiae I only sons. Ibsen was an eldest son.