The fact that highly developed specific talents have never been known to be inherited through more than seven generations is quite in keeping with this view. But even this persistence has been observed only in the case of musical talent, and the long continuance of the inherited talent may well be due, as Francis Galton suggests in his famous statistical investigations into the phenomena of inheritance, to the fact that musical men do not readily choose wives who are absolutely lacking in this talent. It would be easy to rear an exceedingly highly gifted musical group of families within the German nation, if we could secure that only the highly-gifted musically should unite in marriage--that is, if personal selection could play its part. In another more general domain of mental endowment a case of this kind has been recorded, for Galton tells us of three highly gifted English families which intermarried for ten generations, and in that time scarcely produced a descendant who did not deserve to be called a distinguished man in some direction or other. Of course, such continued persistence, through a long series of generations, of a high general mental level is more possible than the transmission and increase of a specific talent, for in the former case it is a question of a mixture of different high mental endowments, of which not all need be developed in every individual, and yet the individual need not fall to mediocrity if he possesses a combination of other qualities. But in musical talent, on the other hand, the falling from the height once attained takes place as soon as this one character is no longer represented in a sufficiently strong majority of determinants. Of course it would be a mistake to believe that the talent of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven depended solely on the highly developed musical sense; in them, as in all great artists, many highly developed mental qualities must have combined with the musical sense; a simpleton could never have written the Mass in B minor or the Passion of St. Matthew even if he had possessed the musical genius of Sebastian Bach. In this fact lies a further reason why genius is seldom found at the same pitch in two successive generations; the combination of mental characters always varies from father to son, and slight displacements may give rise to very great differences in relation to the manifestations of the specific talent. Under certain circumstances, the weak development of a single trait of character, as, for instance, power of action, or the excessive development of another, such as indecision or desultoriness, may so nullify the existing favourable combinations of mental characters, such as, let us say, musical sense, inventive talent, depth of feeling, &c., that they bear no fruit worth mentioning. And since as we have already seen, the different mental qualities of the parents are to a certain extent separately transmitted, that is, since they may appear in the children in the most