Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/513

Rh percentage of scientific men of high distinction, but the differences are not so large as to be significant.

As it is much easier to determine nationality than race, so occupation can be stated more readily than social position. It would be desirable to know the social connections and incomes of the fathers of scientific men at the period when their sons were educated, but each information is not at hand. Men in the same profession have very different social environments; in manufacturing and trade a man may be an artisan or a multi-millionaire. It is, however, clear that a majority of scientific men come from the so-called middle and upper classes. Not very far from half of them are supplied by the professional classes, forming about one thirtieth of the population, and undoubtedly they tend to be sons of the more successful professional men. Under manufacturing and trade all sorts of occupations are included, but only a small part of the fathers belong to the class of artisans and still fewer to the class of clerks. Most of them own their own business, which may be anything from a small shop in a university town to the control of a railway system. Not a single scientific man is recorded as coming from the class engaged in domestic service, nor is any known to be the son of a day laborer, even of the higher grades. Agriculture includes agricultural laborers, but the fathers of the scientific men usually owned their own farms, and were probably in the main the farmers of the better class with relatives among professional men. Our farming population belongs chiefly to a yeoman class, not to a peasant class, such as forms nine tenths of the population of Russia.

The earlier studies of scientific men made by De Candolle and Galton and the groups treated by Odin and Ellis yield results in regard to the origin of men of performance comparable with those here given. De Candolle found that of 100 foreign associates of the Paris Academy of Sciences, 41 came from noble and wealthy families, 52 from the middle class and 7 from the working class. Galton found that of 96 contemporary leading men of science none came from the artisan and peasant classes. Odin found that of 823 French men of letters, 65 per cent. came from the nobility and governing classes, 23 per cent, from the professions, 12 per cent, from the commercial and middle classes and 16 per cent. from the lower classes. Ellis found that of 829