Herltage of Intellect.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXV, Issue XXXXV, 9 December 1903, Page 4

Herltage of Intellect.

OBSERVATIONS BY SCIENTISTS. Some of the results of years of patient inquiry into the relationship between the inheritance in men of normal and mental characters, were given by Professor Karl Pearson in the fourth Huxley Memorial Lecture which he recently delivered to the members of the Anthropological Institute. 1 Some 6000 schedules were distributed among tine school teachers, who gave details of the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of pairs of Iwothers, pairs of sisters, and; brothers and sisters under their charge. From this immense amount of data curves were plotted, from which the professor deduced that the inheritance of mental and moral qualities was the same as that of physical, I that if a man had ten units of any specified quality more or less than the average, his brother on the average would have five times more or less. Geniality and probity and ability might be fostered by home environment and education, but they were bred and not created ; it was the stock itself that made its home environment ; education was of small service unless it was applied to an intelligent race of men. There was a want of intplllgeivee in t'hp British merchant, professional man, unci workman, and we were at the commencement of an epoch which would be marked by a great dearth of ability. The remedy lay beyond the reaeh of revised educational systems ; we htoid failed to realise that the psyschical characters which are tiio backbone of the State were not manufactured by home, school, or college. They wre bred in the bone of the last fovty years, t'ho intellectual classes of the' nation had ceased to give in due jjrqpqrtfohi the 1 ' iuen wanted to r.prry' on the over-growing work of empire, to battle in thefore ranks of the ever-intensiflcd struggle of nations. The remedy lay first in getting the intellectual section of the community to realise that intelligence could be aided and trained, but •Chat no training or education could create it. It must be bred, that was the broad result for statecraft which flowed from *lie equality in inherjtanct) cjf ths psychical and the physical in man.