788 



AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



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 innumer- 

 able cockerels that might be trained and 

 are not. 



The 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 scien- 

 tific work as a boy taken at random from 

 the community. Tlie 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. 

 Galton 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 sliown by the same methods 

 to be even stronger in the families con- 

 ducting the leading publishing and bank- 

 ing 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 Galton 's noteworthy families of 

 fellows of the Royal Society. The fact 

 that his father-in-law was chief construc- 

 tor 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 priv- 

 ilege as well as by physical heredity; on 



the other hand, marriage, chiefly deter- 

 mined by environment, is an important 

 factor in maintaining family lines. The 

 often-quoted cases of the Juke 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 generations. The recently pub- 

 lished "Kallikak Family" by Dr. H. H. 

 Goddard demonstrates once again the 

 heredity of feeblemindedness. It would, 

 however, have been a stronger argument 

 for the omnipotence of heredity if the 

 original ancestor had left by a healthy 

 mother illegitimate children who estab- 

 lished prosperous lines of descent, and a 

 child by a feeble-minded wife who left 

 degenerate lines of descent. Two experi- 

 ments have been made on a large scale 

 which seem fairly definite even though 

 quantitative results can not at present be 

 reached. The mulattoes may be assumed 

 to have a heredity midway between 

 negroes and whit-es, but their social en- 

 vironment is that of the negroes, and 

 their performance corresponds with their 

 social environment rather than with their 

 lieredity. Illegitimate children have per- 

 haps a heredity as good as the average, 

 but their performance falls far below the 

 average. If i)erformance were determined 

 by heredity alone there might be expected 

 to be among our thousand leading scien- 

 tific men some forty mulattoes and some 

 forty of illegitimate birth, whereas there 

 is probably not one of either class. 



At nearly the same time Agassiz came 

 from abroad to Han-ard and Briinnow 

 to Michigan. We all know the list of 

 distinguished naturalists trained under 

 Agassiz Brooks, Hyatt, Jordan, Lyman, 

 Minot, Morse, Packard, Putnam, Scudder, 

 Shaler, Verrill, Whitman, Wilder and 

 many more, directly and indirectly. 

 From ]\Iichigan have come, as is not so 

 well known, one fourth of our most dis- 

 tinguished astronomers, including Abbe, 



