A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS. S97 



times been put aside as the expressions of an amiable weakness. It re- 

 quires some credulity, however, to believe that men of preeminent, or 

 even less than preeminent, intellectual acuteness are unable to estimate 

 the character of their own parents. The frequent sense of indebtedness 

 to their mothers expressed by eminent men may be taken as largely 

 due to the feeling that the inheritance of moral or temperamental 

 qualities is an even more massive and important inheritance than defi- 

 nite intellectual aptitudes. Such inheritance coming to intellectual 

 men from their mothers may often be observed where no definite intel- 

 lectual aptitudes have been transmitted. It is not, however, of a kind 

 which can well be recorded in biographical dictionaries, and I have not, 

 therefore, attempted to estimate its frequency in the group of pre- 

 eminent persons under consideration. 



I have, however, attempted to estimate the frequency of one other 

 form of anomaly in the parents besides intellectual ability. The parents 

 of persons of eminent intellectual power may not themselves have been 

 characterized by unusual intellect; but they may have shown mental 

 anomaly by a lack of aptitude for the ordinary social life in which they 

 were placed. In at least 31 cases (or over 3 per cent.) we find that the 

 father was idle, drunken, brutal, extravagant, unsuccessful in business, 

 shiftless, or otherwise a ne'er-do-weel. In such cases, we may conclude, 

 the father has transmitted to his eminent child an inaptness to follow 

 the beaten tracks of life, but he has not transmitted any accompanying 

 aptitude to make new individual tracks. This list could easily be en- 

 larged if we included milder degrees of ineffectiveness, such as marked 

 the father of Dickens (supposed to be represented in Micawber). A 

 certain degree of inoffensive eccentricity, recalling Parson Adams, seems 

 to be not very uncommon among the fathers of men of eminent ability, 

 and perhaps furnishes a transmissible temperament on which genius 

 may develop. It may be noted that 5 of the ne'er-do-weel fathers (a very 

 large proportion) belonged to eminent women. Whether this con- 

 firms the conclusion already suggested as to the special frequency of 

 paternal transmission in the case of women of eminent ability I cannot 

 undertake to say. It may be added, however, that a ne'er-do-weel father, 

 by forcing the daughter to leave home or to provide for the family, fur- 

 nishes a special stimulus to her latent ability. 



In 276 cases I have been able to ascertain with a fair degree of cer- 

 tainty the size of the families to which these persons of eminent ability 

 belong. A more than fair degree of certainty has not been attainable, 

 owing to the loose and inexact way in which the national biographers 

 frequently state the matter. Sometimes we are only told that the 

 subject of the article is 'the child' or 'the son'; this may mean the only 

 child, but it is impossible to accept such a statement as evidence regard- 

 ing the size of the family, and the number of families with only children 



