August 13, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



2U9 



etates for density. One finds in this list only 

 three of Professor Cattell's ten leading states, 

 that is, the ten leading states which gave birth 

 to half his total niimber of scientists. Should 

 the problem be worked out carefully there 

 would be found, I have no doubt, some corre- 

 lation between the birth of superior men and 

 density of population. Considering the great 

 over-proportion which cities are known to 

 produce, I can not see how it can fail to be 

 so, but it appears on first sight that it will be 

 significant to one who might wish to predict a 

 result, not so much to know that there is a 

 center of density as to know which particular 

 center it is. The group of states, New Jersey, 

 Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Vir- 

 ginia, are not usually thought of as lacking in 

 " wealth, opportunity, institutions and social 

 traditions," and yet this territory is distinctly 

 behind New England in the production of 

 scientific men, and only as good as the great 

 western and north-central divisions, which 

 were largely peopled by New England stock. 



One might ask why the latter districts, if 

 formed from the stock of New England, have 

 not done equally as well as New England 

 itself. The answer from the standpoint of 

 heredity would be that distinguished scien- 

 tific men come in great proportion from fam- 

 ilies of the professional and upper classes' and 

 that these families had, prior to 1860, gener- 

 ally stayed at home in New England. The 

 great western migration of the last century 

 must have produced a kind of natural selec- 

 tion. Very likely the west has been the gainer 

 and New England the loser, from the stand- 

 point of vigor, energy and ambition. But it 

 seems fair to suppose that while the better of 

 the middle classes might have joined the emi- 

 grant trains, the intellectual aristocracy did 

 not. 



To distinguish between heredity and envi- 

 ronment is at best a difficult problem, and the 

 statistics here analyzed give, of course, no final 

 answer. All I wish to say is, that there is 



* Conf. Galton, " English Men of Science," Lon- 

 don, 1874; Galton and Schuster, "Noteworthy 

 Families," London, 1906; Candolle, " Histoire des 

 sciences et des savants," Genfeve, 1873 ; Ellis, " A 

 Study of British Genius," London, 1904. 



nothing in these birth ratios to shake ones 

 belief in the extreme importance of heredity," 

 or even to show that environment is the main 

 cause of the " direction of the performance " 

 itself. 



Frederick Adams Woods 

 Brookline, Mass., 

 April 15, 1909 



Dk. Woods permits me to add some com- 

 ments to his discussion. The adjacent states 

 of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with a 

 population of 1,691,213 in 1860, have produced 

 174 of our thousand leading scientific men, 

 whereas the adjacent states of Georgia, Flor- 

 ida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, with 

 a population of 3,661,218 in 1860, have pro- 

 duced but seven. The one region has pro- 

 duced per thousand of its population more 

 than fifty times as many scientific men as the 

 other.' This great difference, it appears, is 

 more probably due to social conditions, educa- 



' This disparity will be reduced to nearly half 

 il the negroes are excluded. The fact that the 

 southern whites are nearer to the negroes in their 

 scientific productivity than to New Englanders, 

 is in favor of scientific performance being due 

 to social environment rather than to stock. A 

 similar argument may be drawn from the fact, if it 

 proves to be a fact, that mulattoes resemble blacks 

 more than whites in their scientific productivity. 

 It is, however, also the case that if the southern 

 whites and the negroes were given equally an 

 environment favorable to scientific work, the 

 whites might far surpass the negroes. The ques- 

 tion as to whether scientific productivity is mainly 

 due to heredity or environment is not one that 

 can be answered without qualifications and ex- 

 planations. If environment is the same, differ- 

 ences are due to heredity; if heredity is the same, 

 differences are due to environment. As President 

 Lowell has recently remarked, we have a better 

 chance of rearing eaglets from eagles' eggs placed 

 under a hen than from liens' eggs placed in an 

 eagle's nest. But it is also true that we have a 

 better chance of raising tame eaglets in a chicken 

 coop than in an eyrie. The difference between a 

 man uninterested in science and a scientific man 

 is not that between a chicken and an eagle, but 

 that between an untrained chicken and a trick 



° For a list of researches which lead to this 

 belief, see Science, April 9, 1909, page 579. 



