904 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 1016 



birth -with the reigning sovereign houses, but 

 have not reigned since the Napoleonic era. It 

 is easy to tell the actual sovereigns in von 

 Behr as they are printed in capital letters. 

 These are not always kings; a few are of 

 ducal and princely royal houses, but even here 

 some inherit the succession as sovereigns while 

 others do not. With the exception of Mont- 

 morency (6 members) all the persons in the 

 following tables are of strictly royal families. 

 Of the 403 persons in Table II., 94 are 

 " obscure " ; that is, not enough could be 

 easily found out about them to warrant grad- 

 ing them for intellect in a scale of 10. More 

 careful researches than I have yet been able 

 to make, would doubtless reduce the number 



Sovereigns by in- 

 heritance 



Non-sovereigns... 



Probable distribu 

 tionof "obscure'' 



sovereigns 



Probable distribu- 

 tion of "obscure" 

 non-sovereigns... 



Corrected sover- 



ereigns 



Per cent, of sover- 

 eigns 



20 

 30 



3250 

 4852 



201 



108 



19 



75 

 220 

 183 



54.6 



of the " obscure," but I have always felt that 

 this was not necessary to secure the conclu- 

 sions which have been obtained. It is not 

 necessary to secure the heredity correlations, 

 and now it appears that the error which this 

 introduces is not significant for the present 

 inquiry. Of these 94 obscure members, 19 are 

 sovereign-s and 75 are non-sovereigns. The 

 sovereigns are almost certainly and non- 

 sovereigns probably, not worthy of grades 

 (8), (9) or (10). They would probably form 

 a curve of distribution about the grades (4) 

 and (5). The non-sovereigns would find their 

 center a little higher and spread out a little 

 more. They are approximately arranged in 

 the third and fourth horizontal columns. 

 Now it can be seen that grades (3), (4), (5) 



and (6) as they appear in the uncorrected 

 horizontal columns, at the top of Table II., 

 will stand the introduction of a number of 

 non-sovereigns without dimissing the 54.6 per 

 cent, which is the average. Can these 94 " ob- 

 scure " members be placed in Table II. with- 

 out overbalancing the results? The reader 

 will see that they can. For although the 75 

 " obscure " non-sovereigns count against my 

 thesis, the 19 " obscure " sovereigns count in 

 its favor; and all added together give a con- 

 firmatory result. In the previous investiga- 

 tion there were about 62 per cent, in each 

 grade, who were sovereigns; now there are 

 about 54. The truth of the whole matter is, 

 that while there are, in the second research, a 

 large number of (4) and (5) grades among 

 the sons, in the previous research these medi- 

 ocre persons were represented in the ancestry. 

 The previous statistics could not settle the 

 question of how many there were who were 

 " obscure." The present research does settle 

 the point, since it takes them up one by one 

 and counts them all, in a series of " frater- 

 nities " one generation after the other. 



Those who look carefully will see that there 

 is a slight tendency for the sovereigns to run 

 to the higher grades, but such a tendency is 

 negligible for two reasons, even if a much 

 larger total should make it exceed the probable 

 error. Those who have inherited the throne 

 must, on the average, have lived slightly longer 

 than those who have not. A long life must 

 favor the chances of inheritance. If the 

 sovereigns have been longer lived, then they 

 have had that much more time in which to 

 distinguish themselves. Another point is that 

 for all forms of genius (painters, poets, scien- 

 tists, authors, etc.) and for the mentally ab- 

 normal as well, it has been claimed that the 

 probabilities favor the firstborn beyond chance 

 expectation. But some of these results have 

 been questioned. 



At any rate this does not concern the con- 

 tention which I have made that there is no 

 marked or easily measurable influence of op- 

 portunity on sovereigns, at least as arising 

 from their official position. 



Here then is an attempt to measure the rela- 



