Transfer the inquiry to America, and it becomes even more conclusive, for this is supposed to be the country of equal opportunities, where it is a popular tradition that every boy has a chance to become president. Success may be in some degree a family affair in caste-ridden England; is it possible that the past history of the United States should show the same state of affairs? Galton found that about half of the great men of England had distinguished close relatives. If the great men of America have fewer distinguished close relatives, environment will be able to make out a plausible case: it will be evident that in this continent of boundless opportunities the boy with ambition and energy gets to the top, and that this ambition and energy do not depend on the kind of family he comes from. Frederick Adams Woods has made precisely this investigation.[10] The first step was to find out how many eminent men there are in American history. Biographical dictionaries list about 3,500, and this number provides a sufficiently unbiased standard from which to work. Now, Dr. Woods says, if we suppose the average person to have as many as twenty close relatives--as near as an uncle or a grandson--then computation shows that only one person in 500 in the United States has a chance to be a near relative of one of the 3,500 eminent men--provided it is purely a matter of chance. As a fact, the 3,500 eminent men listed by the biographical dictionaries are related to each other not as one in 500, but as one in five. If the more celebrated men alone be considered, it is found that the percentage increases so that about one in three of them has a close relative who is also distinguished. This ratio increases to more than one in two when the families of the forty-six Americans in the Hall of Fame are made the basis of study. If all the eminent relations of those in the Hall of Fame are counted, they average more than one apiece. Therefore, they are from five hundred to a thousand times as much related to distinguished people as the ordinary mortal is. To look at it from another point of view, something like 1% of the population of the country is as likely to produce a man of genius as is all the rest of the population put together,--the other 99%. This might still be due in some degree to family influence, to the prestige of a famous name, or to educational advantages afforded the sons of successful men. Dr. Woods' study of the royal families of Europe is more decisive.[11]