tain more than four-fifths, and the six mediocre classes more than nineteentwentieths of the entire population. Thus, the rarity of commanding ability, and the vast abundance of mediocrity, is no accident, but follows of necessity, from the very nature of these things. . . .

...

The class C possesses abilities a trifle higher than those commonly possessed by the foreman of an ordinary jury. D includes the mass of men who obtain the ordinary prizes of life. E is a stage higher. Then we reach F, the lowest of those yet superior classes of intellect, with which this volume is chiefly concerned.

THE JUDGES OF ENGLAND BETWEEN 1660 AND 1865

The Judges of England, since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, form a group peculiarly well adapted to afford a general outline of the extent and limitations of heredity in respect to genius. A judgeship is a guarantee of its possessor being gifted with exceptional ability; the Judges are sufficiently numerous and prolific to form an adequate basis for statistical inductions, and they are the subjects of several excellent biographical treatises. It is therefore well to begin our inquiries with a discussion of their relationships. We shall quickly arrive at definite results, which subsequent chapters, treating of more illustrious men, and in other careers, will check and amplify.

It is necessary that I should first say something in support of my assertion, that the office of a judge is really a sufficient guarantee that its possessor is exceptionally gifted. In other countries it may be different to what it is with us, but we all know that in England, the Bench is never spoken of without reverence for the intellectual power of its occupiers. A seat on the Bench is a great prize, to be won by the best men. . . .

If not always the foremost, the Judges are therefore among the foremost, of a vast body of legal men. . . .

There are 286 judges within the limits of my inquiry; 109 of them have one or more eminent relations, and three others have relations whom I have noticed, but they are marked off with brackets, and are therefore not to be included in the following statistical deductions. . . .

First, it will be observed, that the judges are so largely interrelated, that 109 of them are grouped into only 85 families. There are seventeen doublets, among the judges, two triplets, and one quadruplet. In addition to these, might be counted six other sets, consisting of those whose ancestors sat on the Bench previously to the accession of Charles II, namely, Bedingfield, Forster, Hyde, Finch, Windham, and Lyttleton. Another fact to be observed, is the nearness of the relationships in my list. The single letters are far the most common. Also, though a man has twice as many grandfathers as fathers, and probably more than twice

as many grandsons as sons, yet the Judges are found more frequently to have eminent fathers than grandfathers, and eminent sons than grandsons. In the third degree of relationship, the eminent kinsmen are yet more rare, although the number of individuals in those degrees is increased in a duplicate proportion. When a judge has no more than one eminent relation, that relation is nearly always to be found in the first or second degree. I annex a table (Table III) ... which exhibits these facts with great clearness. Column A contains the facts just as they were observed, and column D shows the percentage of individuals, in each degree of kinship to every 100 judges, who have become eminent.

What I profess to prove is this: that if two children are taken, of whom one has a parent exceptionally gifted in a high degree-say as one in 4,000, or as one in a million-and the other has not, the former child has an enormously greater chance of turning out to be gifted in a high degree, than the other. Also, I argue that, as a new race can be obtained in animals and plants, and can be raised to so great a degree of purity that it will maintain itself, with moderate care in preventing the more faulty members of the flock from breeding, so a race of gifted men might be obtained, under exactly similar conditions.

COMPARISON OF RESULTS

...

Let us now bring our scattered results side to side, for the purpose of comparison, and judge of the extent to which they corroborate one another, -how far they confirm the provisional calculations made in the chapter on Judges from more scanty data, and where and why they contrast.

The number of cases of hereditary genius analysed in the several chapters of my book amounts to a large total. I have dealt with no less than 300 families containing between them nearly 1,000 eminent men, of whom 415 are illustrious, or, at all events, of such note as to deserve being printed in black type at the head of a paragraph. If there be such a thing as a decided law of distribution of genius in families, it is sure to become manifest when we deal statistically with so large a body of examples.

In comparing the results obtained from the different groups of eminent men, it will be our most convenient course to compare the columns B of the several tables. Column B gives the number of kinsmen in various degrees, on the supposition that the number of families in the group to which it refers is 100. All the entries under B have therefore the same common measure, they are all percentages, and admit of direct intercomparison. I hope I have made myself quite clear: lest there should remain any misapprehension, it is better to give an example. Thus, the families of Divines are only 25 in number, and in those 25 families there are 7