34 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE 2I0NTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



cited which seem very little to the purpose, and 

 multitudes of instances are omitted which oppose 

 themselves, at a first view at any rate, to the be- 

 lief that heredity plays the first part in the genesis 

 of great minds. Nearly all the greatest names in 

 philosophy, literature, and science, and a great 

 number of the greatest names in art, stand abso- 

 lutely alone. We know nothing achieved by 

 Shakespeare's father or grandfather, or by Goe- 

 the's, or Schiller's. None of Newton's family 

 were in any way distinguished in mathematical 

 or scientific work ; nor do we know of a distin- 

 guished Laplace, or Lagrange, or Lavoisier, or 

 Harvey, or Dalton, or Volta, or Faraday, besides 

 those who made these names illustrious. As to 

 general literature, page after page might be filled 

 with the mere names of those whose ancestry has 

 been quite undistinguished. To say that among 

 the ancestors of Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and so 

 forth, certain qualities — virtues or vices, passions 

 or insensibilities to passion — may be recognized, 

 " among the ancestors of men of science certain 

 aptitudes for special subjects or methods of re- 

 search," among the ancestors of philosophers and 

 literary men certain qualities or capabilities, and 

 that such ancestral peculiarities determined the 

 poetic, scientific, or literary genius of the descend- 

 ant, is in reality to little purpose, for there is 

 probably not a single family possessing claims to 

 culture in any civilized country, among the mem- 

 bers of which individuals might not be found with 

 qualities thus emphasized, so to speak. Such a 

 posteriori reasoning is valueless. If instances 

 could be so classified that after carefully studying 

 them we could make even the roughest approach 

 to a guess respecting the cases in which a family 

 might be expected to produce men of any particu- 

 lar qualities, there would be some use in these 

 attempts at generalization. At present all that 

 can be said is, that some mental qualities and 

 some artistic aptitudes have unquestionably, in 

 certain instances, been transmitted, and that, on 

 the whole, men of great distinction in philosophy, 

 literature, science, and art, are rather more likely 

 than others to have among their relations (more 

 or less remote) persons somewhat above the aver- 

 age in mental or artistic qualities. But it is not 

 altogether certain that this superiority is even 

 quite so great as it might be expected to be if 

 hereditary transmission played no part at all in 

 the matter. For it cannot be denied that a great 

 mathematician's son has rather a better chance 

 than others of being a mathematician, a great 

 author's son of being a writer, a great artist's son 

 of being skillful in art, a great philosopher's son 



of taking philosophic views of things. Nearly 

 every son looks forward, while still young, to the 

 time when he shall be doing his father's work ; 

 nearly every father hopes, while his children are 

 yet young, that some at least among them will 

 take up his work. The fact that so few sons of 

 great men do follow in their fathers' footsteps 

 shows that, despite the strong ambition of the 

 son, the anxious hope of the father, the son, in 

 the majority of instances, has not had ability even 

 to take a fairly good position in the work wherein 

 the father has been, perhaps, preeminently dis- 

 tinguished. 



We have said that certain mental qualities 

 have certainly been transmitted in some cases. 

 Galton mentions one noteworthy instance relating 

 to memory. In the family of Porson good mem- 

 ory was so notable a faculty as to give rise to the 

 by-word, "the Porson memory." Lady Hester 

 Stanhope, says the late F. Papillon, " she whose 

 life was so full of adventure, gives, as one among 

 many points of resemblance between herself and 

 her grandfather, her retentive memory. ' I have 

 my grandfather's gray eyes,' said she, ' and his 

 memory of places. If he saw a stone on the road, 

 he remembered it; it is the same with myself. 

 His eye, which was ordinarily dull and lustreless, 

 was lighted up, like my own, with a dull gleam 

 whenever he was seized with passion.' " 



In endeavoring to form an opinion on the law 

 of heredity in its relation to genius, we must re- 

 member that a remark somewhat similar to one 

 made by Huxley respecting the origin of new spe- 

 cies applies to the origin of a man of genius. Be- 

 fore he became celebrated, no one cared particu- 

 larly to inquire about his ancestry or relations ; 

 when his fame was established, the time for mak- 

 ing the inquiry had passed away. It is quite 

 possible that, if we had exact and full informa- 

 tion, in a great number of cases, we might find 

 the position taken up by Mr. Galton and M. Ribot 

 greatly strengthened ; it is, however, also possi- 

 ble that we might find it much weakened, not 

 only by the recognition of a multitude of cases 

 in which the approach of a great man was in no 

 sort indicated by scintillations of brightness along 

 the genealogical track, but by a yet greater num- 

 ber of cases in which families containing numbers 

 of clever, witty, and learned folks, have produced 

 none who attained real distinction. 



There is an excellent remark in a thoughtful 

 but anonymous paper on heredity in the Quarterly 

 Journal of Science, two years or so ago, which sug- 

 gests some considerations well worth noting. " If 

 we look," says the writer, " on the intellect as not 



