510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



British men of genius 18.5 per cent, came from the nobility and upper 

 classes, 41.3 per cent, from the professions, 31.2 from the manufacturing 

 and commercial classes, 6 per cent, from the yeomen and farmers and 

 2.5 from the artisan and laboring classes. 



The working classes outnumber the nobility a hundredfold, but 

 produce only one quarter as many men of performance. If the worlc- 

 ing classes have equal ability and if they had been given equal oppor- 

 tunity, instead of a hundred scientific men of the rank of the foreign 

 associates of the Paris Academy there would have been forty thousand. 

 It may be that the peasant and artisan classes in European countries 

 are separated from the upper classes by an inferior heredity; but that 

 is scarcely the case in America. Five or ten generations back most of 

 us have ancestors of nearly the same average physical, intellectual and 

 social condition ; any selection for ability within this short period must 

 be slight and transient. 



It is evident that what a man can do depends on his congenital 

 equipment. How far what he does do depends on his environment and 

 how far on his congenital equipment, or how far his congenital 

 equipment depends on that of his parents and his family line of 

 descent, we do not know. Most sociological writers and some biologists 

 are confused in their use of the concept of heredity. When there 

 is discussion of the relative influence on performance of heredity 

 and environment, by heredity there is sometimes understood the 

 original constitution of the individual and sometimes his resemblance 

 to parents and other relatives. It is conceivable that the original 

 constitution of son and father might be exactly the same and yet 

 the individual be so plastic to environment that under different 

 conditions there would be but slight similarity between their per- 

 formances. It is also conceivable that there might be no similarity be- 

 tween the original constitution of son and father, and yet the per- 

 formance of each be determined by his original constitution almost 

 without influence from environment. Under which of these extreme 

 hypotheses would the current sociologist call heredity strong or weak? 

 The word heredity should be reserved for resemblance due to a com- 

 mon germ plasm and some other word found for the constitution of the 

 fertilized ovum or zygote; perhaps the best that can be done is to use 

 this uncouth word. We can then discriminate between the two dis- 

 tinct questions: What is the resemblance between the zygotes of two 

 brothers ? How far does the zygote of an individual determine his per- 

 formance as an adult? 



The distinctions are of vast importance for the organization of so- 

 ciety. If men of performance could only come from superior family 

 lines, this would be a conclusive argument for a privileged class and for 

 a hereditary aristocracy. If the congenital equipment of an individual 

 should prescribe completely what he will accomplish in life, equality 



