FAMILIES OF AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 511 



of opportunity, education and social reform would be of no significance. 

 Such an extreme position, though it is approached by men with so 

 much authority as Sir Francis Galton, Professor Karl Pearson, Dr. 

 R A. Woods, Dr. C. B. Davenport and Professor E. L. Thorndike, is 

 untenable. Equally extreme in the opposite direction is M. Odin's 

 aphorism "Genius is in things not in men," or the not uncommon 

 opinion that almost anything can be done with a child by training and 

 education. It is a problem of degree and of circumstance, a scientific 

 question that could probably be solved within a reasonable time, if as 

 much intelligence and money were devoted to it as to one of the bureaus 

 of the Department of Agriculture. 



In the meanwhile we must do the best we can with the material at 

 hand, even though the interpretation is in nearly all cases ambiguous. 

 It is here shown that 43 per cent, of our leading scientific men have 

 come from the professional classes. We may conclude that more than 

 one half of our men of science come from the one per cent, of the 

 population most favorably situated to produce them. The son of a 

 successful professional man is fifty times as likely to become a leading 

 scientific man as a boy taken at random from the community. My data 

 also show that a boy born in Massachusetts or Connecticut has been 

 fifty times as likely to become a scientific man as a boy born along the 

 southeastern seaboard from Georgia to Louisiana. They further show 

 that a boy is fifty times as likely to do scientific work as a girl. No 

 negro in this country has hitherto accomplished scientific work of con- 

 sequence. A boy from the professional classes in New England has a 

 million chances to become a scientific leader as compared with one 

 chance for a negro girl from the cotton-fields. 



These great differences may properly be attributed in part to nat- 

 ural capacity and in part to opportunity. When it is asked how far the 

 result is due to each of these factors, the question is in a sense ambig- 

 uous. It is like asking whether the extension of a spiral spring is due 

 to the spring or to the force applied. Some springs can not be ex- 

 tended, a foot by any force; no spring can be extended without force. 

 The result depends on the relation between the constitution of the 

 spring and the force applied. If the 174 babies born in Massachusetts 

 and Connecticut who became leading scientific men had been exchanged 

 with babies born in the south, it seems probable that few or none of 

 them would have become scientific men. It may also be the case that 

 few or none of the babies from the south transplanted to New England 

 would have become scientific men, but it is probably true that a nearly 

 equal number of scientific men would have been reared in New Eng- 

 land. It is certain that there would not have been 174 leading scientific 

 men from the extreme southern states and practically none from 

 Massachusetts and Connecticut. If the stock of the southern states re- 

 mains undiluted, it may, as social conditions change, produce even 



