Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/517

Rh having the natural and specific ability of the thousand in this country who have accomplished the best scientific work.

President A. Lawrence Lowell has remarked that we have a better chance of rearing eaglets from eagles' eggs placed under a hen than from hen's eggs placed in an eagle's nest. But it is equally true that we have a better chance of raising tame eaglets in a chicken coop than in an eyrie. The difference between a man uninterested in science and a scientific man is not that between a chicken and an eagle, but that between an untrained chicken and a trick cock. Some cockerels can be trained better than others, but there are innumerable cockerels that might be trained and are not.

The son of a scientific man may on the average have the inherited ability which would make him under equally favorable circumstances twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, as likely to do good scientific work as a boy taken at random from the community. The degree of advantage should be determined. It surely exists, and the children of scientific men should be numerous and well cared for. But we can do even more to increase the number of productive scientific men by proper selection from the whole community and by giving opportunity to those who are fit. Gallon finds in the judges of England a notable proof of hereditary genius. It would be found to be much less in the judges of the United States. It could probably be shown by the same methods to be even stronger in the families conducting the leading publishing and banking houses of England and Germany. As I write, the death is announced of Sir William White, the distinguished naval engineer, chief constructor of the British navy, president of the British Association. If his father had been chief constructor of the navy, he would have been included among Gallon's noteworthy families of fellows of the Royal Society. The fact that his father-in-law was chief constructor of the British navy throws, if only by way of illustration, a light on the situation in two directions.

On the one hand, the specific character of performance and degree of success are determined by family position and privilege as well as by physical heredity; on the other hand, marriage, chiefly determined by environment, is an important factor in maintaining family lines. The often-quoted cases of the Jukes and Edwards families are more largely due to environment and intermarriage within that environment than to the persistence of the traits of one individual through several generations. The recently published "Kallikak Family" by Dr. H. H. Goddard demonstrates once again the heredity of feeble-mindedness. It would, however, have been a stronger argument for the omnipotence of heredity if the original ancestor had left by a healthy mother illegitimate children who established prosperous lines of descent, and a child by a feeble-minded wife who left degenerate lines of descent. Two