BASIS OF INVESTIGATION. 69 



continued to increase from generation to generation. An examin- 

 ation of the list also shows that, of those belonging to the period 

 prior to the fifteenth century, the majority are entitled to have their 

 names in this list only from the fact that they were hereditary mon- 

 archs, or princes who became involved in some of the wars of the 

 period. On the other hand, the majority of those included in the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have their names included be- 

 cause they exhibited great mental power. 



ONE HUNDRED GREATEST MEN. 



In 1900 Charles Denby, former United States Minister to 

 China, and John Q. Howard, of the Library of Congress, joined in 

 compiling a list of the one hundred greatest men in the world's his- 

 tory. The list begins with Homer and ends with Edison, thus cov- 

 ering a period of 2,800 years. I have subjected this list to the same 

 test so as to locate the men of greatest intellect. In the first 1,200 

 years of this time there were fifteen men, being Greeks and Romans. 

 In the next 1,200 years there are twelve men, being one in each cen- 

 tury except the eleventh, which has two, and the twelfth, which has 

 none. Of these twelve men, all but Alfred the Great, Gutenberg 

 and Dante, are either religious reformers or soldiers. These three 

 are the only representatives of statesmanship, invention and litera- 

 ture in twelve centuries. In the remaining four centuries we have 

 seventy-three men, fifty-three of whom come in the classes of states- 

 manship, science, invention and literature. Of the one hundred 

 greatest men in the world's history, we have seventy-three per cent 

 of them concentrated in one-seventh of the time, and that one-sev- 

 enth is located at the place where use-inheritance calls for it to be 

 located. 



