Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) | Page 9

so its results are unaffected by the
detail whether the population is kept stationary by an increased
birth-rate of children or other infertiles, accompanied by an increased

death-rate among them, or contrariwise.
The exact conclusions were ("Nature," September 29, 1904, p. 529),
that if 2d be the number of children in a family, half of them on the
average being male, and if the population be stationary, the number of
fertile males in each specific ancestral kinship would be one, in each
collateral it would be _d_-½, in each descending kinship d. If 2d = 5
(which is a common size of family), one of these on the average would
be a fertile son, one a fertile daughter, and the three that remained
would leave no issue. They would either die as boys or girls or they
would remain unmarried, or, if married, would have no children.
The reasonable and approximate assumption I now propose to make is
that the number of fertile individuals is not grossly different to that of
those who live long enough to have an opportunity of distinguishing
themselves. Consequently, the calculations that apply to fertile persons
will be held to apply very roughly to those who were in a position, so
far as age is concerned, to achieve noteworthiness, whether they did so
or not. Thus, if a group of 100 men had between them 20 noteworthy
paternal uncles, it will be assumed that the total number of their
paternal uncles who reached mature age was about 100, making the
intensity of success as 20 to 100, or as 1 to 5. This method of roughly
evading the serious difficulty arising from ignorance of the true values
in the individual cases is quite legitimate, and close enough for present
purposes.
CHAPTER VIII.
--NUMBER OF NOTEWORTHY KINSMEN IN EACH DEGREE.
The materials with which I am dealing do not admit of adequately
discussing noteworthiness in women, whose opportunities of achieving
distinction are far fewer than those of men, and whose energies are
more severely taxed by domestic and social duties. Women have
sometimes been accredited in these returns by a member of their own
family circle, as being gifted with powers at least equal to those of their
distinguished brothers, but definite facts in corroboration of such

estimates were rarely supplied.
The same absence of solid evidence is more or less true of gifted youths
whose scholastic successes, unless of the highest order, are a doubtful
indication of future power and performance, these depending much on
the length of time during which their minds will continue to develop.
Only a few of the Subjects of the pedigrees in the following pages have
sons in the full maturity of their powers, so it seemed safer to exclude
all relatives who were of a lower generation than themselves from the
statistical inquiry. This will therefore be confined to the successes of
fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles, great-uncles, great-grandfathers,
and male first cousins.
Only 207 persons out of the 467 who were addressed sent serviceable
replies, and these cannot be considered a fair sample of the whole.
Abstention might have been due to dislike of publicity, to inertia, or to
pure ignorance, none of which would have much affected the values as
a sample; but an unquestionably common motive does so
seriously--namely, when the person addressed had no noteworthy
kinsfolk to write about. On the latter ground the 260 who did not reply
would, as a whole, be poorer in noteworthy kinsmen than the 207 who
did. The true percentages for the 467 lie between two limits: the upper
limit supposes the richness of the 207 to be shared by the 260; the
lower limit supposes it to be concentrated in the 207, the remaining 260
being utterly barren of it. Consequently, the upper limit is found by
multiplying the number of observations by 100 and dividing by 207,
the lower by multiplying by 100 and dividing by 467. These limits are
unreasonably wide; I cannot guess which is the more remote from the
truth, but it cannot be far removed from their mean values, and this
may be accepted as roughly approximate. The observations and
conclusions from them are given in Table VII., p. xl.
CHAPTER IX.
--MARKED AND UNMARKED DEGREES OF
NOTEWORTHINESS.

Persons who are technically "noteworthy" are by no means of equal
eminence, some being of the highest distinction, while others barely
deserve the title. It is therefore important to ascertain the amount of
error to which a statistical discussion is liable that treats everyone who
ranks as noteworthy at all on equal terms. The problem resembles a
familiar one that relates to methods for electing Parliamentary
representatives, such as have been proposed at various times, whether it
should be by the coarse method of one man one vote, or