Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/605

Rh been put aside as the expressions of an amiable weakness. It requires some credulity, however, to believe that men of preeminent, or even less than preeminent, intellectual acuteness are unable to estimate the character of their own parents. The frequent sense of indebtedness to their mothers expressed by eminent men may be taken as largely due to the feeling that the inheritance of moral or temperamental qualities is an even more massive and important inheritance than definite intellectual aptitudes. Such inheritance coming to intellectual men from their mothers may often be observed where no definite intellectual aptitudes have been transmitted. It is not, however, of a kind which can well be recorded in biographical dictionaries, and I have not, therefore, attempted to estimate its frequency in the group of preeminent persons under consideration.

I have, however, attempted to estimate the frequency of one other form of anomaly in the parents besides intellectual ability. The parents of persons of eminent intellectual power may not themselves have been characterized by unusual intellect; but they may have shown mental anomaly by a lack of aptitude for the ordinary social life in which they were placed. In at least 31 cases (or over 3 per cent.) we find that the father was idle, drunken, brutal, extravagant, unsuccessful in business, shiftless, or otherwise a ne'er-do-weel. In such cases, we may conclude, the father has transmitted to his eminent child an inaptness to follow the beaten tracks of life, but he has not transmitted any accompanying aptitude to make new individual tracks. This list could easily be enlarged if we included milder degrees of ineffectiveness, such as marked the father of Dickens (supposed to be represented in Micawber). A certain degree of inoffensive eccentricity, recalling Parson Adams, seems to be not very uncommon among the fathers of men of eminent ability, and perhaps furnishes a transmissible temperament on which genius may develop. It may be noted that 5 of the ne'er-do-weel fathers (a very large proportion) belonged to eminent women. Whether this confirms the conclusion already suggested as to the special frequency of paternal transmission in the case of women of eminent ability I cannot undertake to say. It may be added, however, that a ne'er-do-weel father, by forcing the daughter to leave home or to provide for the family, furnishes a special stimulus to her latent ability.

In 276 cases I have been able to ascertain with a fair degree of certainty the size of the families to which these persons of eminent ability belong. A more than fair degree of certainty has not been attainable, owing to the loose and inexact way in which the national biographers frequently state the matter. Sometimes we are only told that the subject of the article is 'the child' or 'the son'; this may mean the only child, but it is impossible to accept such a statement as evidence regarding the size of the family, and the number of families with only children