THE INHERITANCE OF MENTAL ABILITY 109 
classes. A similar rating was made of moral qualities. The 
rating of the intellectual status of royalty,—a very difficult 
matter,—was made on as impartial a basis as possible. Grades 
g and 10 included only names occurring in Lippincott’s Dictionary 
of Biography and especially celebrated also on account of high 
intellectual power. Judgments of biographers and historians 
were relied upon for determining the various grades. Many 
errors of rating were doubtless made, as Woods himself admits, 
but it is not probable that many of the lowest classes were put 
into the highest classes, or vice versa. Probably most individuals 
in the middle grades belong somewhere near the grade in which 
they were placed. In a statistical investigation of this sort if 
most of the judgments are approximately correct the conclusions 
drawn will be of value. 
While much evidence was given of the alternative inheritance 
of mental traits, it was shown that rulers of great ability mani- 
fested a strong tendency to cluster in groups. Such families 
as the Montmorencys, Condés, and the Houses of Nassau-Orange 
and Hohenzollern and the descendants of Gustavus Vasa of 
Sweden present a marked contrast to the House of Hanover and 
several other dynasties. 
The parent-offspring correlation based on 494 pairs was .3007 
for mental and .2983 for moral qualities. Offspring and their 
grandparents gave a correlation of .161 for mental and .175 for 
moral qualities. The results obtained by Woods are in striking 
agreement with those of Pearson, Schuster and Elderton and 
other investigators, the agreement being all the more noteworthy 
since the material investigated differs so much from that of other 
studies. 
A short paper by Woods on Heredity and the Hall of Fame 
offers additional evidence of transmitted ability; 26 out of 46 
men in the Hall of Fame had close eminent relatives. “Tf all 
the eminent relatives of those in the Hall of Fame are counted, 
they average more than one apiece. Therefore, they are from 
500 to 1,000 times as much related to distinguished people as the 
ordinary mortal is.” 
