108 



Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



paper he communicated to Nature on August 11, 1904 (Vol. lxx, pp. 354-6) 

 entitled : " Distribution of Successes and of Natural Ability among the Kins- 

 folk of Fellows of the Royal Society." Galton received more than 200 replies to 

 a circular with a blank schedule (see our pp. 105-6) which he had sent to 

 the Fellows. In this paper he deals with the 110 which arrived up to a certain 

 date, and contained one or more noteworthy kinsfolk of the Fellow. Galton 

 introduces a slightly arbitrary system of marking, namely 3, 2, 1 or marks to 

 measure more or less noteworthiness, but gives lists of what sort of positions 

 and honours he paid attention to. All Fellows of the Royal Society were 

 given the highest or starred class with 3 marks. In many cases the judgment 

 as to noteworthiness depended on the opinion of the F.R.S. who filled in the 

 schedule, more especially when it concerned the women of his family. Those 

 who will take the trouble to examine the book later published by Galton 

 and Schuster (see our pp. 113-121) will see how differently various Fellows 

 rated "noteworthiness" in their own families; some consider success as 

 merchant or solicitor, or even the becoming an advocate, as a noteworthy 

 achievement, while others would probably never for a moment suppose such 

 occurrences in their family as more than the ordinary routine of middle-class 

 professional life. Galton for obvious reasons does not provide the marks he 

 allotted to such noteworthiness, and he probably marked it low, but the fact 

 that he gave the highest number of marks to every Fellow of the Royal 

 Society makes his present biographer somewhat sceptical as to the value 

 of his system in grading ability; at the one end you may have a born 

 scientific genius who revolutionises men's ways of thinking of nature, at the 

 other the professional scientist, not known outside his own country, scarcely 

 beyond his own university, and in no way more able than the normal man 

 in any profession who makes a living by his calling. Admittedly Galton's 

 task was a very difficult one and probably his method may have been, if rough, 

 sufficiently accurate to demonstrate the results he considers to flow from it. 

 Let us consider some of these results : 



In the first place he gives a Table, we may notice, for the successes of 

 male kin of Fellows of the Royal Society through A (Male) and B (Female) 

 lines. In this Table the columns headed "Index of Success" are the total 



Successes of Kinsmen of Fellows of the Royal Society. 



