nments. The true genius, he thought,
frequently succeeds in rising despite great obstacles, while no amount
of family pull will succeed in making a mediocrity into a genius,
although it may land him in some high and very comfortable official
position. Galton found a good illustration in the papacy, where during
many centuries it was the custom for a pope to adopt one of his nephews
as a son, and push him forward in every way. If opportunity were all
that is required, these adopted sons ought to have reached eminence as
often as a real son would have done; but statistics show that they
reached eminence only as often as would be expected for nephews of great
men, whose chance is notably less, of course, than that of sons of great
men, in whom the intensity of heredity is much greater.

Transfer the inquiry to America, and it becomes even more conclusive,
for this is supposed to be the country of equal opportunities, where it
is a popular tradition that every boy has a chance to become president.
Success may be in some degree a family affair in caste-ridden England;
is it possible that the past history of the United States should show
the same state of affairs?

Galton found that about half of the great men of England had
distinguished close relatives. If the great men of America have fewer
distinguished close relatives, environment will be able to make out a
plausible case: it will be evident that in this continent of boundless
opportunities the boy with ambition and energy gets to the top, and that
this ambition and energy do not depend on the kind of family he comes
from.

Frederick Adams Woods has made precisely this investigation.[10] The
first step was to find out how many eminent men there are in American
history. Biographical dictionaries list about 3,500, and this number
provides a sufficiently unbiased standard from which to work. Now, Dr.
Woods says, if we suppose the average person to have as many as twenty
close relatives--as near as an uncle or a grandson--then computation
shows that only one person in 500 in the United States has a chance to
be a near relative of one of the 3,500 eminent men--provided it is
purely a matter of chance. As a fact, the 3,500 eminent men listed by
the biographical dictionaries are related to each other not as one in
500, but as one in five. If the more celebrated men alone be considered,
it is found that the percentage increases so that about one in three of
them has a close r