150 THE EVOLUTION THEORY 



The fact that highly developed specific talents have never been 

 known to be inherited through more than seven generations is quite 

 in keeping with this view. But even this persistence has been 

 observed only in the case of musical talent, and the long continuance 

 of the inherited talent may well be due, as Francis Galton suggests in 

 his famous statistical investigations into the phenomena of inheritance, 

 to the fact that musical men do not readily choose wives who are 

 absolutely lacking in this talent. It would be easy to rear an 

 exceedingly highly gifted musical group of families within the 

 German nation, if we could secure that only the highly-gifted musically 

 should unite in marriage — that is, if personal selection could play its 

 part. In another more general domain of mental endowment a case 

 of this kind has been recorded, for Galton tells us of three highly 

 gifted English families which intermarried for ten generations, and 

 in that time scarcely produced a descendant who did not deserve 

 to be called a distinguished man in some direction or other. 



Of course, such continued persistence, through a long series of 

 generations, of a high general mental level is more possible than the 

 transmission and increase of a specific talent, for in the former case 

 it is a question of a mixture of different high mental endowments, 

 of which not all need be developed in every individual, and yet the 

 individual need not fall to mediocrity if he possesses a combination 

 of other qualities. But in musical talent, on the other hand, the 

 falling from the height once attained takes place as soon as this one 

 character is no longer represented in a sufticiently strong majority 

 of determinants. Of course it would be a mistake to believe that 

 the talent of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven depended solely on the 

 highly developed musical sense ; in them, as in all great artists, many 

 highly developed mental qualities must have combined with the 

 musical sense ; a simpleton could never have written the Mass in 

 B minor or the Passion of St. Matthew even if he had possessed the 

 musical genius of Sebastian Bach. In this fact lies a further reason 

 why genius is seldom found at the same pitch in two successive 

 generations ; the combination of mental characters always varies 

 from father to son, and slight displacements may give rise to very 

 great differences in relation to the manifestations of the specific 

 talent. Under certain circumstances, the weak development of 

 a single trait of character, as, for instance, power of action, or the 

 excessive development of another, such as indecision or desultoriness, 

 may so nullify the existing favourable combinations of mental 

 characters, svich as, let us say, musical sense, inventive talent, depth 

 of feeling, &c., that they bear no fruit worth mentioning. And since, 



