FAMILIES OF AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 513 



having the natural and specific ability of the thousand in this country 

 who have accomplished the best scientific work. 



President A. Lawrence Lowell has remarked that we have a better 

 chance of rearing eaglets from eagles' eggs placed under a hen than 

 from hen's eggs placed in an eagle's nest. But it is equally true that 

 we have a better chance of raising tame eaglets in a chicken coop than 

 in an eyrie. The difference between a man uninterested in science and 

 a scientific man is not that between a chicken and an eagle, but that 

 between an untrained chicken and a trick cock. Some cockerels can be 

 trained better than others, but there are innumerable cockerels that 

 might be trained and are not. 



Th§ son of a scientific man may on the average have the inherited 

 ability which would make him under equally favorable circumstances 

 twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, as likely to do good scientific 

 work as a boy taken at random from the community. The degree of 

 advantage should be determined. It surely exists, and the children of 

 scientific men should be numerous and well cared for. But we can 

 do even more to increase the number of productive scientific men by 

 proper selection from the whole community and by giving opportunity 

 to those who are fit. Gallon finds in the judges of England a notable 

 proof of hereditary genius. It would be found to be much less in the 

 judges of the United States. It could probably be shown by the same 

 methods to be even stronger in the families conducting the leading 

 publishing and banking houses of England and Germany. As I write, 

 the death is announced of Sir William White, the distinguished naval 

 engineer, chief constructor of the British navy, president of the British 

 Association. If his father had been chief constructor of the navy, he 

 would have been included among Gallon's noteworthy families of fel- 

 lows of the Eoyal Society. The fact that his father-in-law was chief 

 constructor of the British navy throws, if only by way of illustration, 

 a light on the situation in two directions. 



On the one hand, the specific character of performance and degree 

 of success are determined by family position and privilege as well as by 

 physical heredity; on the other hand, marriage, chiefly determined by 

 environment, is an important factor in maintaining family lines. The 

 often-quoted cases of the Jukes and Edwards families are more largely 

 due to environment and intermarriage within that environment than 

 to the persistence of the traits of one individual through several gen- 

 erations. The recently published "Kallikak Family" by Dr. H. H. 

 Goddard demonstrates once again the heredity of feeble-mindedness. 

 It would, however, have been a stronger argument for the omnipotence 

 of heredity if the original ancestor had left by a healthy mother illegiti- 

 mate children who established prosperous lines of descent, and a child 

 by a feeble-minded wife who left degenerate lines of descent. Two ex- 



VOL. LXXXVI. — 35. 



