92 Life and Letter* of Francis Gal fan 



to humble rank were so severe as they are sometimes described, then all those 

 who surmount them would be prodigies of genius; on the contrary we find 

 many who have risen from the ranks have no claim to 'eminence.' Hmdrances 

 of rank only repress mediocre men, and perliaps some men of pretty fair 

 powers — men of classes below D. Many of D and a great many of E abilitjr 

 rise from the ranks, and Galton holds the very large majority of the intelli- 

 gences above E '. 



"If « man is gift«d with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, 

 I cannot comprehend how such a man should l>e repressed. The world is always tormented with 

 difiiculties waiting to be solved — struggling with idoius and ftwlings to which it can give no 

 adequate expression. If, then, there exists a man capable of solving those diHicullies, or of 

 giving voice to those pent up feelings, he is sure to \>e welcomed with universal acclamation." 

 (p. 39.) 



Galton undoubtedly did not believe in any large frequency of "mute 

 inglorious Miltons" ": he felt convinced 



"that no man can achieve a very high reputation without Ixjing gifted with very high abilities; 

 and I trust I have shown rea.son to believe, that few who jwssess these very high abilities can 

 fail in achieving eminence." (p. 49.) 



Having made these postulates Galton then proceeds to discuss his ma- 

 terial. His method is precisely that of the paper on "Hereditary Talent and 

 Character"; that is to say he makes no attempt to measure in any way the 

 intensity of heredity. He takes the high grades of ability and measures the 

 frequency of their appearance; he then measures the frequency of the ap- 

 pearance in the limited population of kinsmen of the eminent in some .special 

 degree, and finding this much greater than in the general population he 

 argues that it can only be because the special talent runs in families. The 

 whole argument is drawn on statistical lines, but, perhaps, it is not more 

 convincing than the pedigrees themselves of illustrious men, many of which 

 Galton gives in part, and which might easily be amplified and brought u]) 

 to date. 



One of the difficulties of Galton's task is the discovery or appreciation of 

 the number of relatives in each grade of important individuals, and his values, 

 or rather appreciations, are open at times to question. Thus he credits the 

 judges on an average with only one son each, .say with a family of two, i.e. 

 one son and one daughter. But he makes the judge to have on an average 

 \i brothers and 2^ sisters, or to spring from a family of five. In Iwth cases 



' Galt<m cites America as a country of more widely spread culture and eflucation than 

 Great Britain, where the hindrances to rising from the ranks are smaller, and yet their men 

 eminent in science and literature are fewer than ours. Hence lie argues that if our hindrances 

 were les-sened we should not become materially richer in highly eminent men. The footnote 

 which follows seems to justify this ojiinion stated in 1869. 



* A great e<lucationalist recently put to the writer this question : Wt- have had millions of 

 children in London alone through our primarj' schools, we select the Ix-st annually and send 

 them to the secondary schools and the best of these again go to the univei-sities, why have we 

 not yet found a single Darwin, Newton or Milton? The failure is, I think, explicable by the 

 fact that a selection of Galton's F, G and X stocks had Ijeen going on for centuries before the 

 County Councils took the net in hand to fish, possibly a tiifh? crudely, in nearly exhausted 

 waters. 



