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.

    168/424 (page 132)
    Every advancement in dignity is a fresh inducement to the introduction of another heiress into the family. Con- sequently, dukes have a greater impregnation of heiress- blood than earls, and dukedoms might be expected to be more frequently extinguished than earldoms, and earldoms to be more apt to go than baronies. Experience shows this to be most decidedly the case. Sir Bernard Burke, in his preface to the Extinct Peerages, states that all the English dukedoms created from the commencement of the order down to the commencement of the reign of Charles II. are gone, excepting three that are merged in royalty, and that only eleven earldoms remain out of the many created by the Normans, Plantagenets, and Tudors. This concludes my statistics about the heiresses. I do not care to go farther, because one ought to know some- thing more about their several histories before attempting to arrive at very precise results in respect to their fertility. An heiress is not always the sole child of a marriage con- tracted early in life and enduring for many years. She may be the surviving child of a larger family, or the child of a late marriage, or the parents may have early left her an orphan. We ought also to consider the family of the husband, whether he be a sole child, or one of a large family. These matters would afford a very instructive field of inquiry to those who cared to labour in it, but it falls outside my line of work. The reason I have gone so far is simply to show that, although many men of eminent ability (I do not speak of illustrious or prodigious genius) have not left descendants behind them, it is not because they are sterile, but because they are apt to marry sterile women, in order to obtain w^ealth to support the peerage with which their merits have been rewarded. I look upon the peerage as a disastrous institution, owing to its destructive eftects on our valuable races. The most highl3^-gifted men are ennobled; their elder sons are tempted to marry heiresses, and their younger ones not to marry at all, for these have not enough fortune to support both a family and an aristocratical position. So the side-shocts of the genealogical tree are hacked off,