2/6 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
but they are also demoted as a direct result of their poverty. For
Cox, using the favorite ploy of eugenicists, inferred innate parental
intelligence from their occupations and social standing! She ranked
parents on a scale of professions from 1 to 5, awarding their chil-
dren an IQ of 100 for parental rank 3, and a bonus (or deficit) of
10 IQ points for each step above or below. A child who did nothing
worth noting for the first seventeen years of his life could still score
an IQ of 120 by virtue of his parent's wealth or professional stand-
ing.
Consider the case of poor Massena, Napoleon's great general,
who bottomed out at 100 Ai IQ and about whom, as a child, we
know nothing except that he served as a cabin boy for two long
voyages on his uncle's ship. Cox writes (p. 88):
Nephews of battleship commanders probably rate somewhat above 100
IQ; but cabin boys who remain cabin boys for two long voyages and of
whom there is nothing more to report until the age of 17 than their service
as cabin boys, may average below 100 IQ.
Other admirable subjects with impoverished parents and mea-
ger records should have suffered the ignominy of scores below- But Cox managed to fudge and temporize, pushing them all
above the triple-digit divide, if only slightly. Consider the unfor-
tunate Saint-Cyr, saved only by remote kin, and granted an Ai IQ
of 105: "The father was a tanner after having been a butcher,
which would give his son an occupational IQ status of 90 to 100;
but two distant relatives achieved signal martial honors, thus indi-
cating a higher strain in the family" (pp. 90-91). John Bunyan
faced more familial obstacles than his famous Pilgrim, but Cox
managed to extract a score of 105 for him:
Bunyan's father was a brazier or tinker, but a tinker of recognized
position in the village; and the mother was not of the squalid poor, but of
people who were "decent and worthy in their ways." This would be suffi-
cient evidence for a rating between 90 and 100. But the record goes fur-
ther, and we read that notwithstanding their "meanness and
inconsiderableness," Bunyan's parents put their boy to school to learn
"both to read and write," which probably indicates that he showed some-
thing more than the promise of a future tinker (p. 90).Michael Faraday squeaked by at 105, overcoming the demerit of
parental standing with snippets about his reliability as an errand