The Editor: Nature or Nurture? 



237 



"The upshot of it all," Woods 

 decides, "is that, as regards intellectual 

 life, environment is a totally inadequate 

 explanation. If it explains certain char- 

 acters in certain instances, it always fails 

 to explain many more; while heredity 

 not only explains all (or at least 90 

 % of the intellectual side of character 

 in practically every instance, but does 

 so best when questions of environment 

 are left out of discussion." 



GENIUSES CLOSELY RELATED 



Despite the good environment almost 

 uniformly present, the geniuses in 

 royalty are not scattered over the sur- 

 face of the pedigree chart, but form 

 isolated little groups of closely related 

 individuals. One centers in Frederick 

 the Great, another in Queen Isabella of 

 Spain, a third in William the Silent, 

 and a fourth in Gustavus Adolphus. 

 Furthermore, the royal personages who 

 are conspicuously low in intellect and 

 morality are similarly grouped. Careful 

 study of the circiunstances shows noth- 

 ing in the environment that would 

 produce this grouping of genius, while 

 it is exactly what our knowledge of 

 heredity leads us to expect. 



In the next place, do the superior 

 members of royalty have proportion- 

 ately more superior individuals among 

 their close relatives, as we found to be 

 the case among the Americans in the 

 Hall of Fame? A count shows at once 

 that they do. The first six grades all 

 have about an equal number of eminent 

 relatives, but grade 7 has more, while 

 grade 8 has more than grade 7, grade 

 9 has more than grade 8, and the 

 geniuses of grade 10 have the highest 

 proportion of near relatives of their own 

 character. Surely it cannot be sup- 

 posed that a relative of a king in grade 

 8 has on the average a much less favor- 

 able environment than a relative of a 

 king in grade 10. Is it not fair, then, 

 to assume that this relative's greater 

 endowment in the latter case is due to 

 heredity ? 



Conditions are the same, whether 

 males or females be considered. 



Woods next strengthens his case by 

 mathematics, working out coefficients 

 of correlation for the characters of his 



subjects. I shall not trouble you with 

 these, but shall merely tell you that on 

 the whole they correspond with sur- 

 prising closeness to the figures which 

 theory would lead us to expect. 



Thus, the reasons for the belief that 

 heredity is almost the entire cause for 

 the mental differences of these men 

 and women, and that environment or 

 free-will must consequently play very 

 minor roles, are that the measurements 

 we make of actual cases coincide almost 

 exactly with what the laws of heredity 

 lead us to expect; and secondly, the 

 fact that environment or opportunity 

 can hardly be expected to cause, in 

 royalty at least, the great names to 

 occur in close blood connection with 

 others of the same stamp, as we find 

 that they do occur. 



It will be interesting to see just what 

 Woods thinks the proportion of real 

 genius in royalty is. His study includes 

 823 individuals about whom he was 

 able to get sufficiently detailed data to 

 work on, and in this number about 

 twenty are to be classed as geniuses — 

 men who would have made their mark 

 as geniuses by their worth alone, starting 

 from any walk of life, and quite apart 

 from the favorable opportunities which 

 their royal blood furnished thern. This 

 score of geniuses includes Louis II of 

 Bourbon, "The Great Conde;" William 

 the Silent, of Orange; John the Great of 

 Portugal; Frederick WiUiam, the Great 

 Elector of Prussia ; Frederick the Great ; 

 Gustavus Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus 

 of Sweden; and in the grade below this, 

 such men as Admiral Coligny, William 

 III of England, Peter the Great, Prince 

 Eugene of Savoy; Maurice, the Elector 

 of Saxony; Charles XII of Sweden; the 

 Great Turenne, and so on. Now if we 

 accept the count of twenty real geniuses 

 in this group of 823 members of royalty, 

 we have one genius in forty appearing 

 in this stock. How does this compare 

 with the rest of the population? 



A SELECTED BREED 



In the whole period in question, cover- 

 ing a nimiber of centuries, Woods thinks 

 there have certainly not been more than 

 200 men of equal eminence produced 

 by the entire population of the countries 



