206 



SCIENCE 



N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 763 



that kinds of character and degrees of ability are 

 mainly innate, but that the direction of tlie per- 

 formance is mainly due to circumstances, and that 

 the environment imposes a veto on any per- 

 formance not congenial to it. 



Thus while Professor Cattell certainly is 

 not dogmatic, there are two points which to 

 him indicate that heredity can not be the 

 chief cause of scientific performance. These 

 are, first, the great disproportion in the birth 

 rate of scientific men in some regions as com- 

 pared with others, and, second, the failure of 

 Massachusetts to have produced men of high 

 average standing. 



That one part of the country should pro- 

 duce a hundred times as many scientific men 

 as another, or even fifty times as many, 

 seems extraordinary from any point of view, 

 and perhaps to some it would seem as un- 

 likely from the standpoint of environment as 

 from any other; but the point I wish to bring 

 out is that the more probable significant dis- 

 proportion lies a great deal lower than this. 

 His figures, on page 733, show that the hun- 

 dred-to-one ratio applies only where the data 

 are very meager numerically, so that the prob- 

 able error is necessarily large. In order to 

 increase our totals and decrease our probable 

 error, it is better to average a little belt of the 

 southern states all of which show a very low 

 ratio. Thus we get a close idea of the contrast 

 between Massachusetts and a typical low-ratio 

 southern state. The section comprised of the 

 states North Carolina, South Carolina, 

 Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, 

 Louisiana and Texas brings in 26 scientific 

 men against 134 from Massachusetts, with an 

 average ratio of 3.75 per million for the south 

 against 108.8 per million for Massachusetts. 

 Thus we find that Massachusetts has produced 

 nearer to twenty-nine times as many, instead 

 of one hundred times, or fifty times as many, 

 which were the ratios mentioned by Professor 

 Cattell. 



This is still a wide disproportion and one 

 that undoubtedly means something, but I per- 

 sonally should feel that we were getting closer 

 to its real significance if we nearly double the 

 ratio for all the southern states, on account of 

 the negro population, and make it a question 



of northern whites against southern whites. 

 By such a method we get a more homogeneous 

 mass of material, a desirability in biometrical 

 work. 



According to Professor Cattell "the negro 

 may have a racial disqualification [for scien- 

 tific achievement], but even this is not proved." 

 It is of course impossible to absolutely dis- 

 prove such a disqualification, but the same 

 might be said for any organisms, no matter 

 how low in the scale of mental evolution. The 

 fact that millions of negroes have been to 

 school and yet one would scarcely know where 

 to find a single example of a negro scientist 

 suggests strongly an experiment of millions of 

 trials and millions of failures, which gives us 

 some idea of its probability. Is not probabil- 

 ity all that we can get out of statistics, any- 

 way? If we adopt the method of leaving the 

 negroes out of the ratios, we find that Massa- 

 chusetts has produced more probably about 

 seventeen times as many scientific men as a 

 low-ratio southern state. That is, the ratio 

 for the average southern state is raised from 

 3.75 per million to 6.54 per million, while the 

 ratio for Massachusetts is merely raised from 

 108.8 to 109.7 per million. 



There were 27,001,491 whites in the United 

 States according to the census of 1860, and 

 1,221,464 of these lived in Massachusetts. 

 Thus this state might have been expected to 

 have produced 4.52 per cent, of the men of 

 science in Professor Cattell's list. As a mat- 

 ter of fact it has produced 15.4 per cent., or 

 3.4 times the expected. 



Now, the interesting question arises — Is 

 this discrepancy more than might be reason- 

 ably accounted for by differences in stock? 

 I know of no way of exactly answering this 

 question, but I should like to make record here 

 of some investigations I have carried on which 

 seem to show that the results of Professor 

 Cattell may very likely be entirely due to 

 differences in stock. 



Pirst, let us see how Massachusetts stands 

 when general intellectual achievement is taken 

 into consideration instead of special merit in 

 science alone. A little computation from the 

 birth statistics in the latest issue of " Who's 

 Who in America " shows that taking the cen- 



