Chapter 9

Persons who are technically "noteworthy" are by no means of equal eminence, some being of the highest distinction, while others barely deserve the title. It is therefore important to ascertain the amount of error to which a statistical discussion is liable that treats everyone who ranks as noteworthy at all on equal terms. The problem resembles a familiar one that relates to methods for electing Parliamentary representatives, such as have been proposed at various times, whether it should be by the coarse method of one man one vote, or through some elaborate arrangement which seems highly preferable at first sight, but may be found on further consideration to lead to much the same results.

In order to test the question, I marked each noteworthy person whose name occurs in the list of sixty-six families at the end of this book with 3, 2, or 1, according to what I considered his deserts, and soon found that it was easy to mark them with fair consistency. It is not necessary to give the rules which guided me, as they were very often modified by considerations, each obvious enough in itself, but difficult to summarize as a whole. Various provisional trials were made; I then began afresh by rejecting a few names as undeserving any mark at all, and, having marked the remainder individually, found that a total of 657 marks had been awarded to 332 persons; 117 of them had received 3 marks; 101, 2 marks; 104, 1 mark; so the three subdivisions were approximately equal in number. The marks being too few to justify detailed treatment, I have grouped the kinsmen into first, second, and third degrees, and into first cousins, the latter requiring a group to themselves. The first degree contains father and brothers; the second, grandfathers and uncles; the third, great-grandparents and great-uncles. The results are shown in Table VI. The marks assigned to each of the groups are given in the first line (total 657), and the number of the noteworthy persons in each group who received any mark at all is shown in the third line (total 329). In order to compare the first and third lines of entries on equal terms, those in the first were multiplied by 329 and divided by 657, and then entered in the second line. The closeness of resemblance between the second and third lines emphatically answers the question to be solved. There is no significant difference between the results of the marked and the unmarked observations. The reason probably is that the distribution of triple, double, and single marks separately is much the same in each of the groups, and therefore remains alike when the three sets of marks are in use at the same time. It is thus made clear that trouble taken in carefully marking names for different degrees of noteworthiness would be wasted in such a rough inquiry as this.

TABLE VI.--COMPARISON OF RESULTS WITH AND WITHOUT MARKS IN THE SIXTY-FIVE FAMILIES. ___________________________________________________________________ | | | | | | | | | First | Second | Third | First | Total | | | Degree.| Degree.| Degree.| Cousins.| | |______________________|________|________|________|_________|_______| | | | | | | | |Number of marks | 225 | 208 | 102 | 122 | 657 | | assigned | | | | | | |______________________|________|________|________|_________|_______| | | | | | | | |Number of marks | | | | | | | reduced | | | | | | | proportionately | 113 | 104 | 51 | 61 | 329 | |Number of individuals | | | | | | | unmarked | 110 | 112 | 46 | 61 | 329 | |______________________|________|________|________|_________|_______| | | | | | | | | Mean | 111 | 108 | 49 | 61 | 329 | |______________________|________|________|________|_________|_______|

Table VII., in the next chapter, affords an interesting illustration of the character of the ignorance concerning the noteworthiness of kinsmen in distant degrees, showing that it is much lessened when they bear the same surname as their father, or even as the maiden surname of their mother. The argument is this: Table V. has already shown that _me bros_ are, speaking roughly, as frequently noteworthy as _fa bros_--fifty-two of the one to forty-five of the other--so noteworthiness is so far an equal characteristic of the maternal and paternal lines, resembling in that respect nearly all the qualities that are transmitted purely through heredity. There ought, therefore, to be as many persons recorded as noteworthy in each of the four different kinds of great-grandparents. The same should be the case in each of the four kinds of great-uncles. But this is not so in either case. The noteworthy great-grandfathers, _fa fa fa_, who bear the same name as the subject are twice as numerous as the _me fa fa_ who bear the maiden surname of the mother, and more than five times as numerous as either of the other two, the _fa me fa_ and _me me fa_, whose surnames differ from both, unless it be through some accident, whether of a cross marriage or a chance similarity of names. It is just the same with the great-uncles. Now, the figures for great-grandfathers and great-uncles run so closely alike that they may fairly be grouped together, in order to obtain a more impressive whole--namely, two sorts of these kinsmen, bearing the same name as the Subject, contain between them 23 noteworthies, or 11.50 each; two sorts having the mother's maiden surname contain together 11 noteworthies, or 5.50 each; four sorts containing between them 7 names, or an average of 1.75 each. These figures are self-consistent, being each the sum of two practically equal constituents, and they are sufficiently numerous to be significant. The remarkable differences in their numbers, 11.50, 5.50, 1.75, when they ought to have been equal, has therefore to be accounted for, and the explanation given above seems both reasonable and sufficient.