Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/76

65 their parents. All that could be expected on the hypothesis of strict inheritance we do find; that is, occasional startling resemblances, and much more frequently partial ones. From this we have a right to argue that if the breed of men were more pure, the intellectual resemblance of child to parent would be as strict as in the forms of the equally pure breeds of our domestic animals.

I propose to refer in this article to a volume written by M. de Candolle, son of the late famous botanist, and himself a botanist, and scientific man of high reputation, in which my name is frequently referred to and used as a foil to set off his own conclusions. The author maintains that minute intellectual peculiarities do not go by descent, and that I have overstated the influence of heredity, since social causes, which he analyzes in a most instructive manner, are much more important. This may or may not be the case; but I am anxious to point out that the author contradicts himself, and that expressions continually escape from his pen at variance with his general conclusions. Thus he allows (p. 195) that, in the production of men of the highest scientific rank, the influence of race is superior to all others ("prime les autres en importance"); that (p. 268) there is a yet greater difference between families of the same race than between the races themselves; and that (p. 326), since most, and probably all, mental qualities are connected with structure, and as the latter is certainly inherited, the former must be so as well. Consequently, I propose to consider M. de Candolle as having been my ally against his will, notwithstanding all he may have said to the contrary.

The most valuable part of his investigation is this: What are the social conditions most likely to produce scientific investigators, irrespective of natural ability, and a fortiori, irrespective of theories of heredity? This is, necessarily, a one-sided inquiry, just as an inquiry would be that treated of natural gifts alone. But, for all that, it admits of being complete in itself, because it is based on statistics which afford well-known means of disentangling the effect of one out of many groups of contemporaneous influences. The author, however, continually trespasses on hereditary questions, without, as it appears to me, any adequate basis of fact, since he has collected next to nothing about the relatives of the people upon whom all his statistics are founded. The book is also so unfortunately deficient in method, that the author's views on any point have to be sought for in passages variously scattered; but it is full of original and suggestive ideas, which deserve to have been somewhat more precisely thought out and much more compendiously stated.

Its scheme is, to analyze the conditions of social and political life under which the principal men of science were severally living at the