104 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



musicians, and that Landseer, Rosa Bonheur, Teniers, 

 and Titian all belonged to painting families. Of forty- 

 two old masters, chiefly Italian and Dutch, no fewer 

 than eighteen appear to have had eminent relatives — 

 a large proportion. It is certainly safer to take liter- 

 ary, scientific, and artistic talent as a test of heredity 

 than official position, and Galton's statistics under 

 that head furnish a striking proof of hereditary influ- 

 ence. Thus the chances of sons of eminent fathers 

 becoming themselves eminent are shown to be, in the 

 case of literary men, 51 per cent ; men of science, 60 

 per cent ; poets, 45 per cent ; and painters and 

 musicians, 89 per cent. Eminent brothers are some- 

 what less numerous than eminent sons, but still they 

 are a very large class, showing a percentage in the 

 above cases of 42, 47, 40, and 50 respectively. By a 

 very different process M. de Candolle in his Histoire 

 des Sciences et des Savants has arrived at analogous 

 results. The proportion of eminent sons of eminent 

 fathers occurring among the foreign associates of 

 L' Academic des Sciences during the past two hundred 

 years would, in the absence of hereditary influence, 

 be extremely small. Nevertheless M. de Candolle 

 finds it to be as high as 10 per cent. 



