EMINENCE AND HEREDITY

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7848, 10 July 1911, Page 5

EMINENCE AND HEREDITY

Mr W. C, D. Whefcham, F.H.S., and his wifo have been pursuing tho lino of research adopted by Sir Francis Gallon forty years ago in his work on "Hereditary Genius.” They have been studying the new evidences now available concerning the ancestry and offspring of men of ability’. Some of their interesting results they have now set out in the May number of the "Nineteenth Century and After.” Their method was to analyse tho contents of the Dictionary of National Biography from the beginning of the letter li to the, end of the letter AV. This section gavo them about ICO men of eminence who lived between 1720 and 1820. They then proceeded to discover how many of those men's ancestors and descendants were held worthy of a place in tho. dictionary. The eminent men they divided up into three groups. The first contained those who were born into a family possessing a peerage, or who themselves received peerages. Nearly all of these wore men who had distinguished themselves in politics or administration, either civil, military, or diplomatic. Th© second group consisted of men of somewhat similar qualifications who did not receive peerages and were not bom into families possessing that distinction. The third group was mad© uj) of men of eminence in literature and science, poetry, including bishops and divines. The thirty one (31) men in the first group' were found in this way to have had on© hundred and forty-one (141) separate near relatives of distinction, or 4,5 apiece, lu the second group this average was less than one apiece. in the third group of fifty-eight persons there were only sixty-ouo relatives of distinction; that is lo say, scarcely more than ono apiece. After close examination of tho family histories of the men in these different groups, Mr and Airs Wlietham conclude that in groups two and three they were usually dealing with persons who were anomalies to their social surroundings. By birth they belonged to classes th© performance of whose dally duties did not bring with it public notice. Out of hundreds of thousands of such people two or three only attain eminence. If they marry among their accustomed associates before they have risen to eminence thoir children revert to the normal typo of th© family. If they wait for success, they either do not marry at all, or, marrying late, have few or no children. The first group goes to show that "through long centuries the national stock of political, administrative. military, and legal talent has been separated out by a slow process of like, to like mating, and the formation of a class which, if not apart from, is undoubtedly distinct from,, the general mass of the population.” In so far as members of tho other two groups represent exceptions to the normal attributes of the families and classes to which they belong, they appear, according to these investigations, to bo of little value to the racial possibilities of the nation. The writers therefore think it probable that tho class distinctions and segregation of type which exist among tho British and in all civilised races have a real evolutionary meaning, that they are approved methods for securing specialisation and development in the inherent abilities of mankind, and particularly in governing and administrative abilities.