65] ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA 6c 



It appears from the table that some of the old cities of 

 New England, such as Portland, Portsmouth, Newburyport, 

 Salem, Boston, Cambridge, Hartford and New Haven, 

 ranked very high. Other northern cities, such as Lowell, 

 Lynn, Cincinnati, Newark, Brooklyn and Pittsburgh, ranked 

 relatively low. Most of the southern cities also ranked low ; 

 Charleston seems to have been a notable exception. 



How are these differences to be explained? Ward and 

 Odin were of the opinion that the superior literary fecun- 

 dity of cities in general is due to their superior educational 

 advantages, and they explained differences among cities in 

 the same way.^ 



On the other hand. Professor Thorndike points out the 

 danger of assuming that educational opportunities entirely 

 account for the high rank of cities when he says : " That 

 cities give birth to an undue proportion of great men does 

 not in the least prove that city life made them great; it may 

 prove that cities attract and retain great men, whose sons 

 are thus city born." ^ It seems reasonable to believe that 

 the theory suggested by Thorndike partially explains the 

 differences existing among cities. For instance, the birth- 

 place of those authors who were the sons of Yale and Har- 

 vard professors was obviously determined by the fact that 

 New Haven and Cambridge had attracted their fathers. 

 This theory may also explain the low rank of the industrial 

 cities of the north, which contained little to attract persons 

 of literary taste. Again, this theory seems to explain ade- 

 quately the low rank of most southern cities, when it is 

 remembered that the cities of the south were almost exclu- 

 sively commercial centers, and that the leisure classes of the 

 south were very fond of country life. Finally, the rank of 



1 Cf. Applied Sociology, ch. ix, and Odin, op. cit., pp. 511 et seq. 



2 Edward L. Thorndike, " A Sociologist's Theory of Education," The 

 Bookman, vol. xxiv, p. 290. 



