596 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



123 cases the father showed such ability; in 65 cases the mother is noted 

 as of unusual ability, or else as being closely related to some person of 

 eminent ability; in 20 of the 65 cases the mother was closely related 

 to some person of very eminent ability, and may, therefore, be fairly 

 presumed to have transmitted an intellectual aptitude whether or not 

 she showed marked signs of such aptitude herself. In 14 cases both 

 the father and the mother probably transmitted intellectual aptitudes. 

 Making allowances for this, it may be said that at least 181 men and 

 women of distinguished ability, or about 20 per cent, of our 902 eminent 

 persons, have inherited intellectual aptitudes. Bearing in mind that 

 in many cases the aptitudes of the parents are unknown or have passed 

 unnoticed, and that in other cases the national biographers have failed 

 to record known facts, it is not improbable that the proportion of cases 

 in which one or other of the parents of our 902 eminent persons dis- 

 played more than average intellectual ability may be at least doubled. 



If we consider the eminent women separately we find that, while 8 

 have had fathers of unusual intellectual ability, only 2 have had moth- 

 ers from whom it can be said that they probably inherited. In one 

 further case (Fanny Burney) both parents possessed ability, the father, 

 however, in a more eminent degree than the mother. Moreover, the 

 two cases in which the mother may probably be said to have transmitted 

 the ability (Mrs. Siddons and Joanna Baillie) are more dubious than 

 those in which it was transmitted by the father. So far as the present 

 very limited data go, it seems probable, therefore, that women have 

 a still more marked tendency than men to inherit intellectual aptitudes 

 from their fathers. 



It would be interesting to inquire into the moral and emotional 

 qualities, the 'character,' of the parents. This, however, is extremely 

 difficult and I have not attempted it. If we could do so we might find 

 that the mothers of eminent men have had greater influence on their 

 sons than the facts, so far as it has been possible to ascertain them, re- 

 garding the transmission of purely intellectual aptitudes would lead us 

 to believe. In a great many cases the mother was a woman of marked 

 piety, and we are frequently led to infer an unusual degree of character 

 on the part of the mother, if not of the father. Moral qualities are 

 quite as essential to most kinds of genius as intellectual qualities, and 

 they are, perhaps, even more highly transmissible. They form the basis 

 on which intellectual development may take place, and they may be 

 transmitted by a parent in whom such development has never occurred. 

 The very frequent cases in which men of eminent intellectual ability 

 have declared that they owed everything to their mothers* have some- 



*A remark of Huxley's in a letter to the present writer — "Mentally and phys- 

 ically I am a piece of my mother" — may be taken as typical of such declarations. 



