Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/408

402 I now turn to the inheritance of the psychical characters. Here again we tread on more difficult ground. On first investigating the problem myself I worked with school children, and for the following reasons. The teacher compares the individual with his general experience of many children; he thus approaches much more nearly an absolute standard than if we ask for an isolated return as to a single family from this or that relatively inexperienced recorder. Secondly, it is not often that we can find any data of the psychical characters of father and son taken at about the same period in life. If you will look at Tables V. and VI. and Fig. 3 you will see that I have not been able to discover any difference in intensity of inheritance between the psychical and physical characters in children. Mr. Schuster has been able to get over my difficulty at least for one character, that of ability in father and son as judged by the Oxford Class Lists. In a recent memoir published by the Galton Eugenics Laboratory he obtains the results given in Table VII. If we allow for an academic selection of intelligence, we reach values singularly close to those obtained for the physical characters. I have added some results of my own, not hitherto published, taken from my family record schedules. To sum up, there appears no doubt that good and bad physique, the liability to and the immunity from disease, the moral characters and the mental temperament, are inherited in man and with much the same intensity.

As a next stage, I point out—if it be needful to do so—that Figs. 4 and 5 show that those who live longest, and may be presumed to be