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138
Hereditary Genius
Making a grand total of fourteen cases out of seventy peers,
resulting in eight instances of absolute sterility, and in two instances
of only one son.
I tried the question from another side, by taking the marriages of the
last peers and comparing the numbers of the children when the
mother was an heiress with those when she was not. I took
precautions to exclude from the latter all cases where the mother
was a co-heiress, or the father an only son. Also, since heiresses are
not so very common, I sometimes went back two or three
generations for an instance of an heiress-marriage. In this way I took
fifty cases of each. I give them below, having first doubled the actual
results, in order to turn them into percentages:—
100 MARRIAGES OF EACH
DESCRIPTION.
Number of sons
to each marriage.
Number of cases in
which the mother
was an heiress.
Number of cases in
which the mother was
not an heiress.
0
22
2
1
1
16
10
2
22
14
3
22
34
4
10
20
5
6
8
6
2
8
7
0
4
above
0
0
100
100
I find that among the wives of peers—
100 who are heiresses have
208 sons and 206 daughters,
100 who are not heiresses have
336 sons and 284 daughters.
1
I fear I must have overlooked one or two sterile marriages; otherwise I cannot
account for the smallness of this number.
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