environment is nearly uniformly favorable. A study of them shows great mental and moral differences between them, and critical evidence indicates that these differences are largely due to differences in heredity. Differences of opportunity do not appear to be largely responsible for the achievements of the individuals.
But, it is sometimes objected, opportunity certainly is responsible for the appearance of much talent that would otherwise never appear. Take the great increase in the number of scientific men in Germany during the last half century, for example. It can not be pretended that this is due to an increased birth-rate of such talent; it means that the growth of an appreciation of scientific work has produced an increased amount of scientific talent. J. McKeen Cattell has argued this point most carefully in his study of the families of one thousand American men of science (Popular Science Monthly, May, 1915). "A Darwin born in China in 1809," he says, "could not have become a Darwin, nor could a Lincoln born here on the same day have become a Lincoln had there been no Civil War. If the two infants had been exchanged there would have been no Darwin in America and no Lincoln in England." And so he continues, urging that in the production of scientific men, at least, education is more important than eugenics.
This line of argument contains a great deal of obvious truth, but is subject to a somewhat obvious objection, if it is pushed too far. It is certainly true that the exact field in which a man's activities will find play is largely determined by his surroundings and education. Young men in the United States are now becoming lawyers or men of science, who would have become ministers had they been born a century or two ago. But this environmental influence seems to us a minor one, for the man who is highly gifted in some one line is usually, as all the work of differential psychology shows, gifted more than the average in many other lines. Opportunity decides in just what field his life work shall lie; but he would be able to make a success in a number of fields. Darwin