That the mother should be equally young is not, he holds,
necessary; he finds some superiority, indeed, provided the father is
young, in somewhat elderly mothers, and there were no mothers under
twenty-three. The rarity of genius among the offspring of distinguished
parents is attributed to the unfortunate tendency to marry too late,
and Vaerting finds that the distinguished men who marry late rarely
have any children at all. Speaking generally, and apart from the
production of genius, he holds that women have children too early,
before their psychic development is completed, while men have children
too late, when they have already "in the years of their highest psychic
generative fitness planted their most precious seed in the mud of the
street."
The eldest child was found to have by far the best chance of turning
out distinguished, and in this fact Vaerting finds further proof of
his argument. The third son has the next best chance, and then the
second, the comparatively bad position of the second being attributed
to the too brief interval which often follows the birth of the first
child. He also notes that of all the professions the clergy come
beyond comparison first as the parents of distinguished sons (who are,
however, rarely of the highest degree of eminence), lawyers following,
while officers in the army and physicians scarcely figure at all.
Vaerting is inclined to see in this order, especially in the
predominance of the clergy, the favourable influence of an unexhausted
reserve of energy and a habit of chastity on intellectual
procreativeness.
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