THE INHERITANCE OF MENTAL ABILITY 109 



classes. A similar rating was made of moral qualities. The 

 rating of the intellectual status of royalty, a very difficult 

 matter, was made on as impartial a basis as possible. Grades 

 9 and 10 included only names occurring in Lippincotf s Dictionary 

 of Biography and especially celebrated also on account of high 

 intellectual power. Judgments of biographers and historians 

 were relied upon for determining the various grades. Many 

 errors of rating were doubtless made, as Woods himself admits, 

 but it is not probable that many of the lowest classes were put 

 into the highest classes, or vice versa. Probably most individuals 

 in the middle grades belong somewhere near the grade in which 

 they were placed. In a statistical investigation of this sort if 

 most of the judgments are approximately correct the conclusions 

 drawn will be of value. 



While much evidence was given of the alternative inheritance 

 of mental traits, it was shown that rulers of great ability mani- 

 fested a strong tendency to cluster in groups. Such families 

 as the Montmorencys, Condes, and the Houses of Nassau-Orange 

 and Hohenzollern and the descendants of Gustavus Vasa of 

 Sweden present a marked contrast to the House of Hanover and 

 several other dynasties. 



The parent-offspring correlation based on 494 pairs was .3007 

 for mental and .2983 for moral qualities. Offspring and their 

 grandparents gave a correlation of .161 for mental and .175 for 

 moral qualities. The results obtained by Woods are in striking 

 agreement with those of Pearson, Schuster and Elderton and 

 other investigators, the agreement being all the more noteworthy 

 since the material investigated differs so much from that of other 



studies. 







A short paper by Woods on Heredity and the Hall of Fame 

 offers additional evidence of transmitted ability; 26 out of 46 

 men in the Hall of Fame had close eminent relatives. "If all 

 the eminent relatives of those in the Hall of Fame are counted, 

 they average more than one apiece. Therefore, they are from 

 500 to 1,000 times as much related to distinguished people as the 

 ordinary mortal is." 



