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Inquiries into Human Faculty
his present personal qualifications are known, but how will he turn out in
later years? The objections to competitive examinations are notorious, in
that they give undue prominence to youths whose receptive faculties are
quick, and whose intellects are precocious. They give no indication of the
directions in which the health, character, and intellect of the youth will
change through the development, in their due course, of ancestral
tendencies that are latent in youth, but will manifest themselves in after
life. Examinations deal with the present, not with the future, although it is
in the future of the youth that we are especially interested. Much of the
needed guidance may be derived from his family history. I cannot doubt,
if two youths were of equal personal merit, of whom one belonged to a
thriving and long-lived family, and the other to a decaying and short-lived
family, that there could be any hesitation in saying that the chances were
greater of the first-mentioned youth becoming the more valuable public
servant of the two.
A thriving family may be sufficiently defined or inferred by the
successive occupations of its several male members in the previous
generation, and of the two grandfathers. These are patent facts attainable
by almost every youth, which admit of being verified in his
neighbourhood and attested in a satisfactory manner.
A healthy and long-lived family may be defined by the patent facts of
ages at death, and number and ages of living relatives, within the degrees
mentioned above, all of which can be verified and attested. A knowledge
of the existence of longevity in the family would testify to the stamina of
the candidate, and be an important addition to the knowledge of his
present health in forecasting the probability of his performing a large
measure of experienced work.
Owing to absence of data and the want of inquiry of the family
antecedents of those who fail and of those who succeed in life, we are
much more ignorant than we ought to be of their relative importance. In
connection with this, I may mention some curious results published by
Mr. F. M. Holland
[1]
of Boston, U.S., as to the antecedent family history
of persons who were reputed to be more moral than the average, and of
those who were the reverse. He has
[1]
Index Newspaper, Boston, U.S. July 27, 1882.
