12 The Third and Fourth Generation 



know what the chance is for the average man. 

 Galton calculated this, too. He assumed that 

 a man would display marked ability by fifty 

 years of age if he was ever going to do so. So 

 by comparing the number of men in the English 

 Men of the Time, later known as Who's Who, 

 with the total number of Englishmen of fifty 

 or more he found the chance of the average 

 man to achieve distinction to be i to 4,000. 

 So the son of a judge is 500 times as likely to 

 display ability as the son of the average man, 

 which Galton thinks is due in large part to his 

 inheritance. Galton's investigation included 

 not only judges, but also scientists, artists, 

 statesmen, and others, embracing in its scope 

 nearly a thousand families. The conclusions 

 reached substantiate those given for the judges. 

 There is given here the family tree of the Bach 

 family, of which Johann Sebastian Bach,organist 

 and composer, was the most noted. The family 

 sprang from well-to-do Thuringian peasant stock 

 that manifested marked musical ability even 

 before the records are sufficiently accurate to 

 show what relation these early talented indi- 



