Hooker, Herschel, Jussieu, Saussure, Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Among philosophers we find the Scaligers, the Vossius, the Fichtes, and the brothers Humboldt, Schlegel and Grimm; among statesmen the Pitts, Foxes, Cannings, Walpoles, Peels, and Disraelis; among archæologsts, the Viscontis. Aristotle, himself the son of a scientific phy- sician, had sons and nephews who were men of science. Cassini, an astronomer, had a son, who was a celebrated astronomer, a grandson who was a member of the Academy of Sciences at the age of twenty-two, and a more remote relation who was a distinguished naturalist and philologist.
Here is the genealogical tree of the Bernouilli family
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All the members of this family were distinguished in some science; at the beginning of this century there was a Bernouilli who was a chemist of some distinction; and in 1863 there still lived at Bâle Christophe Bernouilli, a professor of the natural sciences.
Galton, in a work of great value, but in which he often commits the mistake (from which I also cannot free myself) of confusing talent with genius, calculates a proportion of 425 men of ability to a million among the male population over fifty years of age, and the more select part of them as 250 to a million. Dealing with 300 families, containing 1000 eminent men, he concludes that the percentage of eminent kinsmen in these families would be as follows:—
- 48 sons
- 41 brothers
- 31 fathers
- 14 grandsons
- 22 nephews
- 18 uncles
- 13 cousins
- 17 grandfathers
- 3 great-grandfathers
- 5 great-uncles
