Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Inheritance of Ability: Being a Statistical Study of the Oxford, Class Lists and of the School Lists of Harrow and Charterhouse
AT the time Of the first publication of Mr Calton's Hereditary Genius, in 1869, the belief in the hereditary nature of inborn natural ability was held by very few; but SO great has been the in?uence of that and other works that at the present time it would be almost impossible to find an educated person to dispute it, and the inheritance of psychical characters ranks with motor-cars and the morphia habit among the ingredients in the composition of the contemporary novel.
With the diffusion Of an idea it becomes progressively more vague and indefinite, so that an attempt to give it crispness of outline becomes all the more desirable, and for this purpose one must substitute, for a description that is merely qualitative, one that is also quantitative, and, having recognized the pressure and direction of a force, one must endeavour to measure it.
Such a description Of the inheritance of the mental and moral qualities has been given by Professor Pearson in his Huxley Lecture before the Anthropological Institute, and it has been our endeavour to confirm and supplement his results with others Obtained from different material treated at the outset in a fundamentally different way.
The essential difference between his results and oursis that the former are based on the estimates of the school teachers of the ability of pairs of brothers, or Sisters, or brothers and Sisters, while we have used the results of the examinations for the ba. Degree at Oxford, the position in the school of boys in the school at definite times in their life or in their school career. This has enabled us with regard to the Oxford material to measure the average resemblance between father and son, as well as that between brother and brother, and we Shall endeavour to Show that, after certain allowances have been made, our results are substantially in agreement, not only with those of Professor Pearson, which are referred to above, but also with other work on more easily measurable characters.
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