Hereditary genius : an inquiry into its laws and consequences.

  • Galton, Francis, 1822-1911.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hereditary genius : an inquiry into its laws and consequences. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    137/424 (page 101)
    gifts as a scholar and critic. They distinguished him in early life and descended to his son, the late Principal of New Inn Hall, at Oxford, but they were not shared by his brother. Yet, although the great Duke had nothing of the scholar or art-critic in him, he had qualities akin to both. His writings are terse and nervous, and eminently effective. His furniture, equipages, and the like were characterised by unostentatious completeness and efficiency under a pleasing form. I do not intend to go seriatim through the many names mentioned in my appendix. The reader must do that for himself, and he will find it well worth his while to do so ; but I shall content myself here with throwing results into the same convenient statistical form that I have already employed for the Judges, and arguing on the same bases that the relationships of the Statesmen abun- dantly prove the hereditary character of their genius. In addition to the English statesmen of whom I have been speaking, I thought it well to swell their scanty numbers by adding a small supplementary list, taken from various 23eriods and other countries. I cannot precisely say how large was the area of selection from which this list was taken. I can only assure the reader that it contains a considerable proportion of the names, that seemed to me the most conspicuous among those that I found described at length, in ordinary small biographical dictionaries. TABLE I. SUMMARY OF RELATIONSHIPS OF 35 ENGLISH STATESMEN, GROUPED INTO 30 FAMILIES. One relation {or tivo in the family). Bolingbroke (Visct. St. John) g. Disraeli F. Francis, Sir P F. Gi'attan g. Horner B. Perceval n. Romilly, Sir S S. Scott (Lord Stovvell) ... B. WillierforcG S.