236 NATURAL INHERITANCE. 



parison is made in the bottom line of the Table by adding together 

 the instances in which the Fraternities are from 4 to 6 in number, 

 and in taking only those in which all the members of the Fraternity 

 were alike in temper, whether good or bad. There are 7 + 7, or 14, 

 observed cases of this against 2 + 2, or 4, haphazard cases, found in 

 a total of 49 Fraternities. Hence it follows that the domestic influ- 

 ences that tend to differentiate temper wholly fail to overcome the 

 influences, hereditary and other, that tend to make it uniform in 

 the same Fraternity. 



As regards direct evidences of heredity of temper, we must frame 

 our inquiries under a just sense of the sort of materials we have to 

 depend upon. They are but coarse portraits scored with white or 

 black, and sorted into two heaps, irrespective of the gradations of 

 tint in the originals. The processes I have used in discussing the 

 heredity of stature, eye-colour, and artistic faculty, cannot be 

 employed in dealing with the heredity of temper. I must now 

 renounce* those refined operations and set to work with ruder tools 

 on my rough material. 



The first inquiry will be, Do good-tempered parents have, on the 

 whole, good-tempered children, and do bad-tempered parents have 

 bad-tempered ones 1 I have 43 cases where both parents are 

 recorded as good-tempered, and 25 where they were both bad- 

 tempered. Out of the children of the former, 30 per cent, were 

 good-tempered and 10 per cent, bad; out of the latter, 4 per cent. 

 were good and 52 per cent, bad-tempered. This is emphatic testi- 

 mony to the heredity of temper. I have worked out the other less 

 contrasted combinations of parental temper, but the results are 

 hardly worth giving. There is also much variability in the 

 proportions of the neutral cases. 



I then attempted, with still more success, to answer the converse 

 question, Do good-tempered Fraternities have, on the whole, good- 

 tempered ancestors, and bad tempered Fraternities bad-tempered 

 ones 1 After some consideration of the materials, I defined — rightly 

 or wrongly — a good-tempered Fraternity as one in which at le ist 

 two members were good-tempered and none were bad, and a bad- 

 tempered Fraternity as one in which at least two members were 

 bad-tempered, whether or no any cases of good temper were said to 

 be associated with them. Then, as regards the ancestors, I thought 



