AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



785 



successful professional men. Under manu- 

 facturing and trade all sorts of occupa- 

 tions are included, but only a small part 

 of the fathers belong to the class of arti- 

 sans and still fewer to the class of clerks. 

 Most of them own their own business, 

 which may be anything from a small shop 

 in a university town^ to the control of a 

 railway sj'stem. Not a single scientific 

 man is recorded as coming from the class 

 engaged in domestic service, nor is any 

 known to be the son of a day laborer, 

 even of the higher grades. Agriculture 

 includes agricultural laborers, but the 

 fathers of the scientific men usually 

 owned their own farms, and were prob- 

 ably in the main the farmers of the better 

 class with relatives among professional 

 men. Our fajTning population belongs 

 chiefly to a yeoman class, not to a peasant 

 class such as forms nine tenths of the 

 population of Russia. 



The earlier studies of scientific men 

 made by De Candolle and Galton and the 

 groups treated by Odin and Ellis yield 

 results in regard to the origin of men of 

 performance comparable with those here 

 given. De Candolle* found that of 100 

 foreign associates of the Paris Academy 

 of Sciences, 41 came from noble and 

 wealthy families, 52 came from the middle 

 class and 7 from the working class. Gal- 

 lon^ found that of 96 contemporary leading 

 men of science none came from the artisan 

 and peasant classes. Odin*' found that of 

 823 French men of letters, 65 per cent. 



3 A notable case is of three brothers who have 

 attained scientific distinction. They obviously had 

 inherited ability, but the opportunity to exhibit 

 it in scientific research was probably due to the 

 fact that their father's shop was in a university 

 town. 



4 ' ' Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuia 

 deux Si&cles," Gen&ve, 1873. 



5'<Engli&h Men of Science," London, 1874; 

 New York, 1875. 



6"Gen&se des Grands Honimes," Paris et Lau- 

 sanne, 1895. An excellent account of Odin 'a re- 

 searches is given in Lester F. Ward's "Applied 

 Sociology," Boston and Ne<w York, 1906. 

 50 



came from the nobility and governing 

 classes, 23 per cent, from the professions, 

 12 per cent, from the commercial and 

 middle classes and 16 per cent, from the 

 lower classes. Ellis^ found that of 829 

 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 tlie arti.san and laboring 

 classes. 



The working classes outnumbered tiie 

 nobility a hundredfold, but produce only 

 one quarter as many men of performance. 

 If the working 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 as.s(^)ciates 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 eiiuipment. 

 How far what he does do depends on 

 his environment and how fax on his con- 

 genital equipment, or how far his con-- 

 genital 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 tlieir 

 use of the concept of heredity. When 

 there is discus.siou of the relative influ- 

 ence on performance of heredity and en- 

 vironment, by heredity tiiere is sometimes 

 understood the original constitution of 

 the individual and sometimes his resem- 

 blance to partMits and other relatives. It 

 7"A Study of British Genius," London, 1904. 



