54C POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS. 



By HAVELOCK ELLIS. 

 II. NATIONALITY AND RACE. 



IT is scarcely necessary to remark that nationality and race, when used 

 as distinguishing marks of people who all belong to the British 

 Islands, are not identical terms and are both vague. The races — how- 

 ever we may describe them* — constituting the people of Great Britain 

 are to be found in all the main divisions of the two islands, and the 

 fact that a man is English or Scotch or Irish tells us nothing positive 

 as to his race. Some indication of race, however, is in many cases 

 furnished if we know the particular district to which a man's ancestors 

 belonged, and this indication is further strengthened if we can ascer- 

 tain his physical type. 



In endeavoring to ascertain the ancestral roots of these eminent 

 men I have almost entirely discarded the evidence of birthplace; so far 

 as possible I have sought to find where a man's four grandparents 

 belonged; if they are known to belong to four different regions it is 

 then necessary to insert him into four groups; when the evidence is less 

 complete he plays a correspondingly smaller part in the classification. 

 It very rarely happens that the four grandparents can all be positively 

 located. 



I find that 76.8 per cent, of eminent British men and women are 

 English, 15 per cent. Scotch, 5.3 per cent. Irish and 2.9 per cent. Welsh. 

 The proportion of English is very large, but if we take the present 

 population as a basis of estimation it fairly corresponds to England's 

 share; this is not so, however, as regards the other parts of the United 

 Kingdom; Wales, and especially Ireland, have too few people of genius, 

 while Scotland has produced decidedly more than her share. f 



•For an admirable and lucid summary of the present position of this question 

 see Ripley's 'Races of Europe', ch. xii. 



| In a recent careful study ('Where We Get Our Best Men,' London, 1900,) Mr. 

 A. H. H. Maclean has shown that of some 2,500 British persons of ability belong- 

 ing to the nineteenth century 70 per cent, are English, 18 per cent. Scotch, 10 per 

 cent. Irish, and 2 per cent. Welsh. We thus find that by taking a much lower 

 standard of ability and confining ourselves to the most recent period, Scotland 

 stands higher than ever, while Ireland benefits very greatly at the expense of 

 both England and Wales. This is probably not altogether an unexpected result. 

 1 1 is on the whole confirmed by an analysis of British 'Men of the Time,' made by 

 Oonan Doyle ('Nineteenth Century,' Aug., 1888). 



