123 cases the father showed such ability; in 65 cases the mother is noted as of unusual ability, or else as being closely related to some person of eminent ability; in 20 of the 65 cases the mother was closely related to some person of very eminent ability, and may, therefore, be fairly presumed to have transmitted an intellectual aptitude whether or not she showed marked signs of such aptitude herself. In 14 cases both the father and the mother probably transmitted intellectual aptitudes. Making allowances for this, it may be said that at least 181 men and women of distinguished ability, or about 20 per cent, of our 902 eminent persons, have inherited intellectual aptitudes. Bearing in mind that in many cases the aptitudes of the parents are unknown or have passed unnoticed, and that in other cases the national biographers have failed to record known facts, it is not improbable that the proportion of cases in which one or other of the parents of our 902 eminent persons displayed more than average intellectual ability may be at least doubled.
If we consider the eminent women separately we find that, while 8 have had fathers of unusual intellectual ability, only 2 have had mothers from whom it can be said that they probably inherited. In one further case (Fanny Burney) both parents possessed ability, the father, however, in a more eminent degree than the mother. Moreover, the two cases in which the mother may probably be said to have transmitted the ability (Mrs. Siddons and Joanna Baillie) are more dubious than those in which it was transmitted by the father. So far as the present very limited data go, it seems probable, therefore, that women have a still more marked tendency than men to inherit intellectual aptitudes from their fathers.
It would be interesting to inquire into the moral and emotional qualities, the 'character,' of the parents. This, however, is extremely difficult and I have not attempted it. If we could do so we might find that the mothers of eminent men have had greater influence on their sons than the facts, so far as it has been possible to ascertain them, regarding the transmission of purely intellectual aptitudes would lead us to believe. In a great many cases the mother was a woman of marked piety, and we are frequently led to infer an unusual degree of character on the part of the mother, if not of the father. Moral qualities are quite as essential to most kinds of genius as intellectual qualities, and they are, perhaps, even more highly transmissible. They form the basis on which intellectual development may take place, and they may be transmitted by a parent in whom such development has never occurred. The very frequent cases in which men of eminent intellectual ability have declared that they owed everything to their mothers[1] have some-
- ↑ A remark of Huxley's in a letter to the present writer—"Mentally and physically I am a piece of my mother"—may be taken as typical of such declarations.
