228 NATURAL INHERITANCE. 



corded as gopd-tempered for every 55 who are bad, and conversely 

 55 women as good-tempered for 45 who are bad. 



I will not dwell on the immense amount of unhappiness, ranging 

 from family discomfort down to absolute misery, or on the breaches 

 of friendship that must have been occasioned by the cross-grained, 

 sour, and savage dispositions of those who are justly labelled by 

 some of the severer epithets ; or on the comfort, peace, and good- 

 will diffused through domestic circles by those who are rightly 

 described by many of the epithets in the first group. We can 

 hardly, too, help speculating uneasily upon the terms that our own 

 relatives would select as most appropriate to our particular selves. 

 But these considerations, interesting as they are in themselves, lie 

 altogether outside the special purpose of this inquiry. 



In order to ascertain the facts of which the above statistics are a 

 brief summary, I began by selecting the larger families out of my 

 lists, namely, those that consisted of not less than four brothers or 

 sisters, and by noting the persons they included who were described 

 as good or bad-tempered ; also the remainder about whose temper 

 nothing was said either one way or the other, and whom perforce I 

 must call neutral. I am at the same time well aware that, in some 

 few cases a tacit refusal to describe the temper should be inter- 

 preted as reticence in respect to what it was thought undesirable 

 even to touch upon. 



I found that out of a total of 1,361 children, 321 were described 

 as good-tempered, 705 were not described at all, and 342 were 

 described as bad-tempered. These numbers are nearly in the pro- 

 portion of 1, 2, and 1, that is to say, the good are equal in number 

 to the bad-tempered, and the neutral are just as numerous as the 

 good and bad-tempered combined. 



The equality in the total records of good and bad tempers is an 

 emphatic testimony to the correct judgments of the compilers in the 

 choice of their epithets, for whenever a group has to be divided into 

 three classes, of which the second is called neutral, or medium, or 

 any other equivalent term, its nomenclature demands that it should 

 occupy a strictly middlemost position, an equal number of con- 

 trasted cases flanking it on either hand. If more cases were 

 recorded of good temper than of bad, the compilers would have laid 

 down the boundaries of the neutral zone unsymmetrically, too far 



