Thus the impression we gain when, laying aside prejudice, we take a fairly wide and impartial survey of the facts, or even when we investigate in detail the isolated facts to which significance is most often attached, by no means supports the notion that genius springs entirely, or even mainly, from insane and degenerate stocks. In some cases, undoubtedly, it is found in such stocks, but the ability displayed in these cases is rarely, perhaps never, of any degree near the highest. It is quite easy to point to persons of a certain significance, especially in literature and art, who, though themselves sane, possess many near relatives who are highly neurotic and sometimes insane. Such cases, however, are far from justifying any confident generalisations concerning the intimate dependence of genius on insanity. We see, moreover, that to conclude that men of genius are rarely or never the offspring of a radically insane parentage is not to assume that the parents of men of genius are usually of average normal constitution. That would in any case be improbable. Apart from the tendency to convergent heredity already emphasised, there is a wider tendency to slight abnormality, a minor degree of inaptness for ordinary life in the parentage of genius. I found that in 5 per cent. cases (certainly much below the real mark) of the British people of genius, one parent, generally the father, had shown abnormality from a social or parental point of view. He had been idle, or extravagant, or restless, or cruel, or intemperate, or unbusinesslike, in the great majority of these cases "unsuccessful." The father of Dickens (represented by his son in Micawber), who was always vainly expecting something to turn up, is a good type of these fathers of genius. Shakespeare's father may have been of much the same sort. George Meredith's father, again, who was too superior a person for the outfitting business he inherited, but never succeeded in being anything else, is another example of this group of fathers of genius. The father in these cases is a link of transition between the normal stock and its brilliantly abnormal offshoot. In this transitional stage we see, as it were, the stock _reculer pour mieux sauter_, but it is in the son that the great leap is made manifest.