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.

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    understanding that when a barrister was elevated to the Bench, he should either marry his mistress, or put her away. According to this extraordinary statement, it would appear that much more than one half of the judges that sat on the Bench in the beginning of this century, had no legitimate offspring before the advanced period of their lives at which they were appointed judges. One half of them could not, because it was at that stage in their career that they married their mistresses ; and there were others ,who, having then put away their mistresses, were, for the first time, able to marry. Nevertheless, I have shown that the number of the legitimate children of the Judges is considerable, and that even under that limitation, they are, on the whole, by no means an unfertile race. Bearing in mind what I have just stated, it must follow that they are extremely prolific. Nay, there are occasional instances of enormous families, in all periods of their history. But do not the families die out ? I will examine into the de- scendants of those judges whose names are to be found in the appendix to the chapter upon them, who gained peerages, and who last sat on the Bench previous to the close of the reign of George IV. There are thirty-one of them; nineteen of the peerages remain and twelve are extinct. Under what conditions did these twelve become extinct ? Were any of those conditions peculiar to the twelve, and not shared by the remaining nineteen ? In order to obtain an answer to these inquiries, I examined into the number of children and grandchildren of all the thirty-one peers, and into the particulars of their alliances, and tabulated them; when, to my astonishment, I found a very simple, adequate, and novel explanation, of the common cause of extinction of peerages, stare me in the face. It appeared, in the first instance, that a con- siderable proportion of the new peers and of their sons married heiresses. Their motives for doing so are in- telligible enough, and not to be condemned. They have a title, and perhaps a sufficient fortune, to transmit to their eldest son, but they want an increase of possessions for the endowment of their younger sons and their daughters. On