THE PURPOSIVE IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN RACE 58 1 



namely mention in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of the 

 two hundred fourteen philosophers, poets and scientists 

 whose biographies occupy at least one full page of that 

 Encyclopedia, ten had parents of such distinction as to merit 

 independent mention. These names are drawn from all 

 countries and periods during the past twenty-five hundred 

 to three thousand years and during that time it would seem 

 to be a safe guess that there must have been in all civilized 

 countries at least one billion parents. If all of these had pro- 

 duced great personages in the ratio of 1:21, as in the cases 

 cited by Pearl, there would have been nearly fifty million 

 persons instead of two hundred fourteen whose biographies 

 would have occupied a full page each in the Encyclopedia. 



Finally when Pearl says that 95 per cent of the world's 

 greatest men would never have been born if reproduction 

 had been limited to distinguished persons, it must be granted 

 that this is true but only in the sense that not a person in the 

 world would ever have been born the same person if he 

 had had different parents. Beethoven would not have been 

 Beethoven if his father had been Haydn, but who can say 

 that he might not have been replaced by an even greater 

 musical genius? 



Modern genetics does not support the idea that genius 

 comes more frequently from mediocrity than from superiority, 

 except in the sense of the old conundrum: "Why do white 

 sheep eat more than black ones?" Answer: "Because there 

 are more of them. " Genius has natural causes and one of the 

 most important of these is heredity. There is no reason for 

 regarding it as miraculous in origin nor as belonging to the 

 "Order of Melchizedek, who had neither father nor mother, 

 pedigree nor posterity." Owing to extraordinarily fortunate 

 combinations of good genes and of stimulating environment, 

 good things may sometimes come out of Nazareth and world 

 leaders from poor stock, but the fundamental principles of 

 eugenics are absolutely sound and Galton's conclusion that 

 genius is hereditary has been abundantly proved by Pearson 

 and his school, by Gowen (1925), Terman (1916, 1915) and 

 practically by all who have seriously studied this subject. 

 No doubt environment is very important in the development 

 of human personality, but the study of identical twins by 



