66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



their parents. All that could be expected on the hypothesis of strict 

 inheritance we do find ; that is, occasional startling resemblances, and 

 much more frequently partial ones. From this we have a right to 

 argue that if the breed of men were more pure, the intellectual resem- 

 blance of child to parent would be as strict as in the forms of the 

 equally pure breeds of our domestic animals. 



I propose to refer in this article to a volume written by M. de Can- 

 dolle, 1 son of the late famous botanist, and himself a botanist, and 

 scientific man of high reputation, in which my name is frequently 

 referred to and used as a foil to set off his own conclusions. The 

 author maintains that minute intellectual peculiarities do not go by 

 descent, and that I have overstated the influence of heredity, since 

 social causes, which he analyzes in a most instructive manner, are 

 much more important. This may or may not be the case ; but I am 

 anxious to point out that the author contradicts himself, and that 

 expressions continually escape from his pen at variance with his gen- 

 eral conclusions. Thus he allows (p. 195) that, in the production of 

 men of the highest scientific rank, the influence of race is superior to 

 all others ("prime les autres en importance ") ; that (p. 268) there is a 

 yet greater difference between families of the same race than between 

 the races themselves ; and that (p. 326), since most, and probably all, 

 mental qualities are connected with structure, and as the latter is cer- 

 tainly inherited, the former must be so as well. Consequently, I pro- 

 pose to consider M. de Candolle as having been my ally against his 

 will, notwithstanding all he may have said to the contrary. 



The most valuable part of his investigation is this : What are the 

 social conditions most likely to produce scientific investigators, irre- 

 spective of natural ability, and a fortiori, irrespective of theories of 

 heredity ? This is, necessarily, a one-sided inquiry, just as an inquiry 

 would be that treated of natural gifts alone. But, for all that, it 

 admits of being complete in itself, because it is based on statistics 

 which afford well-known means of disentangling the effect of one out 

 of many groups of contemporaneous influences. The author, however, 

 continually trespasses on hereditary questions, without, as it appears 

 to me, any adequate basis of fact, since he has collected next to noth- 

 ing about the relatives of the people upon whom all his statistics are 

 founded. The book is also so unfortunately deficient in method, that 

 the author's views on any point have to be sought for in passages 

 variously scattered ; but it is full of original and suggestive ideas, 

 which deserve to have been somewhat more precisely thought out and 

 much more compendiously stated. 



Its scheme is, to analyze the conditions of social and political life 

 under which the principal men of science were severally living at the 



1 " Histoire des Sciences el des Savants depuis deux Siecks." Par Alphonse de Candolle 

 (Membre Corr. de l'Acad. Sciences, Paris; Foreign Member, Royal Soc, etc.). Geneva, 

 1873. 



