A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS. 211 



place until after this period. Thus, Fanny Burney married at forty- 

 one, Mrs. Browning at forty, Charlotte Bronte at thirty-eight, while 

 George Eliot's relationship with Lewes was formed at about the age of 

 thirty-six; these names include the most eminent English women of let- 

 ters. It would thus appear that there is a tendency for the years of great- 

 est reproductive activity to be reserved for intellectual development, by 

 accelerating or retarding the disturbing emotional and practical influ- 

 ences of real life. This tendency might still be beneficial, even when 

 the best work vras not actually accomplished until after a late marriage. 

 We have now to consider the fertility of the marriages formed by 

 men of preeminent intellectual ability. Lombroso and others have 

 insisted on the tendency to sterility among men of genius, but have 

 always been content merely to cite a few cases in proof. This method 

 can at the most raise merely a presumption in favor of the dictum laid 

 down. The present investigation, covering a very large group of men 

 of the highest intellectual eminence, furnishes more conclusive evidence 

 as to the actual facts. It confirms only to a limited extent the belief 

 in the relative sterility of men of genius, though we have to remember 

 the very high mean age of the individuals we are considering. The 

 married men of intellectual ability in our list number 587; of these, 448 

 had children; seventy-six are definitely stated by the national biog- 

 rapher not to have had children; sixty-three cases remain in which 

 the point is passed without mention, or in which it is stated that the 

 marriage was not fruitful, but that there were illegitimate children. 

 It appears, so far as I can judge, that in the majority of the sixty- 

 three doubtful cases, there were really no legitimate children; this has 

 most often been found to be the case when I have checked the national 

 biographer by other sources of information. In a certain proportion 

 of cases, however, the facts regarding children are not known, and in 

 others the children have apparently been ignored. We may probably 

 conclude that nearly two-thirds of these sixty-three doubtful cases 

 were really unfruitful. (I may add that, even if we exclude the doubt- 

 ful cases altogether, the proportion of unfruitful marriages remains 

 very abnormally large.) We then find that about 20 per cent, of the 

 marriages of British men of genius have been unfruitful. In this 

 case we have not much difficulty in obtaining a normal standard of 

 comparison. Karl Pearson, manipulating the data furnished by Howard 

 Collins, has foimd that during the past century among the middle and 

 upper classes chiefly of British race, or belonging to the United States 

 — a class fairly comparable to those in the present group — the total 

 sterility is about 12 or 13 per cent., rather less than half of this (t. e., 

 about 6 per cent.) being due to what is termed 'natural sterility'; while 

 the remainder (t. e., 6 or 7 per cent.) must be set down to artificial 

 restraints on reproduction. If, again, we turn to New Zealand, where 



