CHILDHOOD PATTERN OF GENIUS—McCURDY 541 
for him and ushered him out of a world of constant bitter disappoint- 
ment into a world of kindly and Christian spirits. 
Chatterton is a supreme example of the dangers and costs of genius. 
Having no father or other appreciative adult to link him to the world, 
he was swallowed up by his imagination. But it is too often over- 
looked in the textbooks that genius in less tragic cases is generally 
a costly gift. Superficially an enviable piece of luck, it is actually a 
fatality which exacts tribute from the possessor. Extreme absorption 
in very hard work is one of the penalties, and sometimes broken health. 
Isolation from contemporaries, often increasing with the years, is 
another. Whether we should include heterosexual difficulties as 
another, I am not sure, but I have indicated some of the facts in the 
last column of table 1 and wish to consider the matter briefly. Fifty- 
five percent of our sample did not marry at all. There may be no 
special significance in this, since according to statistics for the United 
States [11] the marriage rate for the total population of males above 
15 is only about 60 percent and may have been lower in earlier times. 
On the other hand, this group, with the exception of Chatterton, 
ranges in age from 39 to 84 and should be compared with the higher 
age groups. According to the 1930 census in the United States mar- 
’ riage had been entered into by 86 percent of men in the age range 
from 35 to 44, and by age 60, which is about the median for our group 
of geniuses, it had been entered into by about 90 percent. I will only 
note further that some delay or reluctance or dissatisfaction attended 
the marriages of Mill, Goethe, Coleridge, Mirabeau, Wieland, and 
perhaps Melanchthon, but it would not be desirable here to go into 
greater detail because of the impossibility of making appropriate 
comparisons. It may be that for marriages both freely contracted and 
happily sustained a rate of 3 in 20 is not out of the ordinary, though I 
should be inclined to say that here, too, we have an expression of the 
costliness of genius. 
In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a 
sample of 20 men of genius suggests that the typical developmental 
pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention 
focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in inten- 
sive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation 
from other children, especially outside the family; and (8) a rich 
efflorescence of fantasy, as a reaction to the two preceding conditions. 
In stating these conclusions I by no means wish to imply that original 
endowment is an insignificant variable. On the contrary. Galton’s 
strong arguments on behalf of heredity appear to me to be well 
founded; and in this particular sample the early promise of these very 
distinguished men cannot be dissociated from the unusual intellectual 
qualities evident in their parents and transmitted, one would suppose, 
genetically as well as socially to their offspring. It is upon a ground- 
work of inherited ability that I see the pattern operating. Whether 
