396 



NATURE 



[December i8. rqit 



THE INHERITANCE OF THE SAVAI. 

 OFFICER. I 



T T seems good sense to say that a man who 

 ■^ dislikes the sea and all that therein is, who 

 has no spirit of adventure, who is, in short, a low- 

 spirited land-lubber, is not in the least likely to 

 make a distinguished naval officer. You never 

 can tell, of course, for Nelson was always sea- 

 sick and often pessimistic, but the chances are 

 against a man such as we have pictured becom- 

 ing a bright and shining light in the Navy. And 

 that is what Dr. Davenport and his assistant have 

 said, only they have said it very learnedly with 

 a lot of technicalities about " thalassophilia, " 

 "hyperkinetism," "nomadism," and " reces- 

 sives." The study of heredity does not foster 

 a sense of humour, and we cannot wonder. It 

 is a rather dismal science. 



But the memoir before us goes much further 

 than we have indicated. It is argued from sixty- 

 eight biographies that distinguished naval officers 

 have clear-cut special gifts, which are more or 

 less Mendelian characters. They are expressed 

 in the lineage, direct or collateral, and likewise 

 find appropriate expression in early youth. If 

 the number sixty-eight afifords a sufficients broad 

 basis for secure induction, and if such characters 

 as a love for the sea are really crisply defined, 

 non-blending, unit characters, then the conclu- 

 sions reached are of high interest. Both for theory 

 and for action it is very important to know how 

 much a man is made and how much he is born, 

 and this latest product of the industry and 

 enthusiasm of the Cold Spring Harbour labora- 

 tory for the experimental study of evolution and 

 heredity, is a contribution to the answer to this 

 question. We should notice that, apart from the 

 non-inclusion of those distinguished officers whose 

 biographies failed to furnish any details of lineage 

 or of boyhood, no selection of names was made. 

 Dr. Davenport set out without any theory save 

 the preconception which previous studies have 

 warranted, that the hereditary make-up of a dis- 

 tinguished man is likely to include definite traits 

 being not .so much a melange as a mosaic. 



What, then, are the features which may be 

 regarded as part of the natural inheritance of a 

 distinguished naval officer, as contrasted with, 

 let us say, a distinguished clergyman? The first 

 I.S a love for the sea, a specific susceptibility to 

 its call, a "thalassophilia." Unless this or 

 some analogous characteristic, such as nomadism, 

 is in the blood, the ci-.ances are against the boy 

 becoming a distinguished naval officer. Such is 

 the verdict of biography. The second feature is 

 .some form of the spirit of adventure, a willinir- 

 ness to incur responsibilities, a cacacity for raoid 

 decision and action in face of difficulties \ few 

 cases of persistent sea-sickness in admirals may 

 be found— Nelson's is known to all— but there 

 seems to be no instance of a distingui.shed naval 

 officer without some form of the spirit of adven- 



1 "N-<val Officers: Their Heredity and Pevelopment." Bv rh;.w 

 /-D. ivr2ih. (L» "-" e In iMition (if \v..,shington, I9r9.) ^' 



NO. 2616, VOL. 104] 



ture. Very rarely has it taken the form of 

 quarrelsomeness, or of pugnacity, or of devil-may- 

 care rashness — though instances of these are well 

 known—but a distinguished naval officer without 

 the quality at all is a contradiction in terms. The 

 third character that is normally present is the 

 sanguine or buoyant temperament, which is tech- 

 nically descriljed as hyperkinetic in contra.st to 

 the melancholic and fatalistic hypokinetic. Now, 

 it is an interesting fact that a small minority 

 among the sixty-eight were of the hypokinetic 

 type— reserved, taciturn, melancholic, fatalistic— 

 and that two or three of the greatest were strange 

 mixtures of both, like Nelson, passing from the 

 crests to the troughs of temperamental waves, 

 probably enough correlated with changes in blood- 

 pressure that would kill an ordinary man. 

 But the great majority of the famous sea-captains 

 have been markedly hyperkinetic, not only daring 

 pilots when the waves ran high, but also p'ositiveh 

 defiant in danger. 



As it seems to us, Dr. Davenport is too readily 

 satisfied with the evidence that this or that char- 

 acter exhibits Mendelian inheritance, and that he 

 attaches far too little importance to the family 

 tradition and conversation in defining the lines of 

 a boy's development; but he states a strong case 

 in support of the view, which is more convincing 

 in negative than in positive form, that "unless 

 a love of the sea appears on at least one side of 

 the house, hyperkinesis in at least one parent, 

 or, in the case of an eminent naval man, among 

 the male relatives of the mother, one is justified 

 in doubting if the applicant for a naval commis- 

 sion will become an eminent officer." It is easy 

 enough to make fun of this contribution to "the 

 pedigree of the sea-dogs," but the number of 

 round men in square holes is one of the tragedies 

 of the world, and we wonder gravelv how long 

 It will be before wasteful methods of s'election are 

 replaced by those suggested bv expert study of 

 lineage and of childhood. As Mahan once 'said 

 —and he had a great knowledge of naval officers 

 — " Each man has his special gift, and to succeed 

 must act in accordance with it." Dr. Davenport's 

 memoir is a contribution to the art of discovering 

 social gifts, or of estimating the probabilitv of 

 their presence. 



NOTES. 



The newspapers have lately published a big-game 

 hunter's report that a gigantic dinosaurian reptilo 

 related to the extinct Brontosaurus and Diplodocus 

 has been seen living in the Congo region of .Africa 

 1 a'jeontologi?ts. however, receive the storv vith in- 

 creduhtv, and are decidedlv of opinion that it must 

 be founded on mistaken observations. The Dinosauria 

 and all their gigantic reptilian contemporaries, whether 

 on land, in the sea, or in the air, disappeared from 

 every part of the world at the end of the Cretaceous 

 period. If any had survived, some fragments of them 

 vyould ere this have been found in the Tertiarv forma- 

 tions which record the nrogrcss of life between that 

 period and the present dav. It is no contrary argu- 

 nient to quote Sir Harry "Johnston's discoverv of the 

 okapi in the Congo forest, for this is merely a kind 

 of ancestral giraffe which is known bv fossils to have 



