After an introduction, the book delves into chapters on race and nationality, social class, heredity, childhood, marriage, life, pathology, stature, pigments, other miscellaneous things, and a conclusion.
[2] The upper class was separated from the other occupations as its own group, and then underneath this, Ellis put the following: yeoman and farmers, church, law, army, navy, medicine, miscellaneous professions, officials, commercial, crafts, and then artisans and unskilled.
When observing professions that are primarily in farms or in rural areas, Ellis decided that these places provided a much larger potential for intellectual development than urban cities.
In the section talking about heredity, it seems that Ellis supported the idea that it is a large part of people's natural intelligence.
[3] There was a comparison showing that people who were regarded as significantly intelligent were educated in the UK, Scotland, Ireland, and were at the most notable universities.
[4] In examining how others viewed Ellis's work, some scholars suppose that Robert Knox, a professor at Edinburgh, was influenced by many of the topics discussed in this book, such as the characterization of mental and Emotional qualities in people all over Britain.
Many of these researchers still see Ellis as someone who found substantial support to back up findings from others, such as the statistician Francis Galton.
In modern times, this theory has been contested by other studies, but his ideas are still being considered and debated, with both support and criticism.
Another book, written by R. Ochse, titled Before the Gates of Excellence questioned these findings, claiming that these trends are quite different today.
But the matter surely is far more complex than this ... Mr. Ellis has endeavoured to carry a stage further an inquiry which is very interesting and may become one day very important.
Graver still as a defect in most of his general conclusions is the absence of "control" information with regard to normal persons for comparison with his class of "genius," and this defect becomes more glaring when it is considered that the bulk of his statistics is derived from centuries earlier than the last, to which even our general impression of the normal at the present time are probably inapplicable.