94 



The Journal oi Heredity 



"Galton further pointed out that 977 

 ordinary men, selected by chance from 

 the population at large, would have 

 only four such eminent relatives. He 

 concluded as follows: 



"(a) That men who are gifted with 

 high abilities easily rise through all the 

 obstacles caused by inferiority of social 

 rank. 



"(6) Countries where there are 

 fewer hindrances than in England, to 

 a poor man rising in life, produce a 

 much larger proportion of persons of 

 culture, but not of what I call eminent 

 men. [England and America are taken 

 as illustrations.] 



"(c) Men who are largely aided by 

 social advantages are unable to achieve 

 eminence, unless they are endowed 

 with high natural gifts." 



In 1906 F. A. Woods published his 

 study of "Heredity in Royalty," in 

 which he analysed the principal reign- 

 ing houses of Europe, showing that the 

 really great persons in them were 

 closely interrelated and that the right 

 of succession to the throne, which gave 

 great opportunity to a man to achieve 

 distinction, did not suffice to produce 

 real greatness where it did not germin- 

 ally exist as the result of inheritance. 

 Dr. Woods concluded that heredity 

 "explains at least 90% of the intellec- 

 tual side of character in every case," 

 an induction that Dr. Starch thinks is 

 too high. 



At the other end of the scale, among 

 the defectives, delinquents, and de- 

 generates, there is no lack of studies, 

 largely American, to show how feeble- 

 mindedness, for example, runs in 

 families. The Jukes, the Zeros, the 

 Kallikaks, and others are cited by Dr. 

 Starch, somewhat uncritically. 



BAD ENVIRONMENTS 



"To one who wishes to argue in 

 favor of environment as the chief de- 

 termining element in ability and char- 

 acter," he goes on, "such data as have 

 been presented from family histories 

 and relationships are not entirely con- 

 vincing. It might be argued that a 

 given family has so many individuals 

 of high or low intelligence and achieve- 

 ment because its members were born in 



circumstances which did or did not 

 afford opportunities for development 

 and training and for achieving higher 

 success. It might be said that the 

 descendants of the [Jonathan] Edwards 

 family were born and reared among 

 favorable circumstances of educational 

 and financial advantages and conse- 

 quently were fitted for greater tasks 

 and lived in an environment in which 

 larger opportunities offered themselves, 

 whereas the members of such a lineage 

 as the Jukes family would have just 

 the opposite environment of birth, 

 education, and opportunity in life. 



"In answer to all this, we must re- 

 member, however, that ability very 

 largely determines the sort of environ- 

 ment in which a person is satisfied to 

 live, that a really capable person is 

 quite likely to push forw^ard and to find 

 a way out of the environment in which 

 he may happen to have been born, or 

 to improve it if he cannot leave it, and, 

 finally, we must remember that the 

 persons of low ability were born in cir- 

 cumstances of a correspondingly low 

 nature because of the hereditary stock 

 of the families from which they came. 

 Their parents were content to live 

 under the circumstances under which 

 they did live, because their abilities and 

 desires sought for nothing better." 



BROTHERS AND SISTERS 



Dr. Starch then proceeds to the 

 correlations of measurements between 

 brothers and sisters in mental traits 

 which, just as for physical, average 

 around +0.50. He describes a study 

 of his own on students of the University 

 of Wisconsin in which it appeared that 

 "the resemblance of siblings is appar- 

 ently no greater in those mental traits 

 which are directly affected by school 

 work than in those which are not so 

 affected. The average correlation in 

 the former group of tests is 0.42 and 

 in the latter 0.38. This seems to indi- 

 cate that the mental similarities of 

 children of the same parents are due 

 primarily to heredity rather than to 

 similarity of environment, since the 

 resemblance is no greater in those 

 traits, which are more directly affected 

 by environment." 



