mature age was about 100, making the intensity of success as 20 to
100, or as 1 to 5. This method of roughly evading the serious
difficulty arising from ignorance of the true values in the
individual cases is quite legitimate, and close enough for present
purposes.




CHAPTER VIII.--NUMBER OF NOTEWORTHY KINSMEN IN EACH DEGREE.


The materials with which I am dealing do not admit of adequately
discussing noteworthiness in women, whose opportunities of achieving
distinction are far fewer than those of men, and whose energies are
more severely taxed by domestic and social duties. Women have
sometimes been accredited in these returns by a member of their own
family circle, as being gifted with powers at least equal to those of
their distinguished brothers, but definite facts in corroboration of
such estimates were rarely supplied.

The same absence of solid evidence is more or less true of gifted
youths whose scholastic successes, unless of the highest order, are a
doubtful indication of future power and performance, these depending
much on the length of time during which their minds will continue to
develop. Only a few of the Subjects of the pedigrees in the following
pages have sons in the full maturity of their powers, so it seemed
safer to exclude all relatives who were of a lower generation than
themselves from the statistical inquiry. This will therefore be
confined to the successes of fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles,