CATTELL ON EUGENICS 301 



**The son of a scientific man may on the average have the 

 inherited ability which would make him under equally favor- 

 able circumstances twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, 

 as likely to do good scientific work as a boy taken at random 

 from the community. The degree of advantage should be 

 determined. It surely exists, and the children of scientific 

 men should be numerous and well cared for. But we can do 

 even more to increase the number of productive scientific men 

 by proper selection from the whole community and by giving 

 opportunity to those who are fit. Galton finds in the judges 

 of England a notable proof of hereditary genius. It would be 

 found to be much less in the judges of the United States. It 

 could probably be shown by the same methods to be even 

 stronger in the families conducting the leading publishing 

 and banking houses of England and Germany. As I write, 

 the death is announced of Sir William White, the distin- 

 guished naval engineer, chief constructor of the British navy, 

 president of the British Association. If his father had been 

 chief constructor of the navy, he would have been included 

 among Galton's noteworthy families of fellows of the Royal 

 Society. The fact that his father-in-law was chief construc- 

 tor of the British navy throws, if only by way of illustration, 

 a light on the situation in two directions. 



On the one hand, the specific character of performance and 

 degree of success are determined by family position and 

 privilege as well as by physical heredity; on the other hand, 

 marriage, chiefly determined by environment, is an import- 

 ant factor in maintaining family lines. The often-quoted 

 cases of the Jukes and Edwards families are more largely due 

 to environment and intermarriage within that environment 

 than to the persistence of the traits of one individual through 

 several generations. The recently published *' Kallikak 

 Family " by Dr. H. H. Goddard demonstrates once again the 

 heredity of feeble-mindedness. It would, however, have been 

 a stronger argument for the omnipotence of heredity if the 

 original ancestor had left by a healthy mother illegitimate 

 children who established prosperous lines of descent, and a 



