VARIATION AND HEREDITY 19 



eighteen men of great ability. Among them were 

 three Cabinet Ministers, three Generals, two Admirals 

 and one other distinguished sailor who was created a 

 K.C.B. and a Baronet, one Bishop, one Governor and 

 one Governor-General. 



As an illustration of the inheritance of scientific 

 ability we may take the doubly related families of 

 Darwin and Wedgwood, and the allied family of 

 Galton a specially appropriate example for the purpose 

 in hand. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth 

 century with Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and 

 S. G. Galton, in five generations these interconnected 

 families have produced no less that sixteen men of 

 marked scientific attainments, of whom nine were 

 Fellows of the Royal Society. 



In all such cases, the reproduction of ability seems 

 chiefly to depend on a right choice of mates. It is 

 well for a country when its able families of special 

 types consort together socially, so that the rising 

 generation naturally select their partners from an 

 appropriate circle of like ability to their own. 



The effect of this association is brought out clearly 

 by an inquiry 1 made by the present writers into the 

 ancestry and offspring of men of ability, on the lines 

 of Galton's classical work on the subject, but with the 

 advantage of the more modern material collected in the 

 pages of the Dictionary of National Biography. Names 

 of men living between the years 1720 and 1820 were 

 taken from a portion of the Dictionary. A notice of 

 twenty lines in the summary contained in the index 



1 Nineteenth Century and After, May 1911. 



