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Some French refugee artist, who had been indebted to my great-grandparents for kindness, had shown his gratitude by painting a picture of the execution of that Duc de Vandaleur who perished in the Revolution, my great-grandfather having been the model.
Disregarding the chances of intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on backward, until very soon, in less than fifty generations, we should find that, but for the qualification introduced, we should have all the earth's inhabitants of that time as our progenitors.
Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two parents, one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and so on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum of all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the inherited make-up.
A man! weighted with the sins of his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, who fade off into dim spectral shapes in the dark and dreamlike past; no word of choice has he in the selection of his father and mother, no voice in the choosing of environment brought into life without his consent and thrust out of it against his will battling, striving, hoping, cursing, waiting, loving, praying; burned by fever, torn by passion, checked by fear, reaching for friendship, longing for sympathy, clutching nothing.
At all events, there are now on record cases of children whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are known to have been mouth-breathers, and who have on that account been sharply watched for the possible development of adenoids in early life, and these removed as soon as they appeared, and they have grown up with well-developed, wide nostrils, broad, flat palates, and regular teeth, overcoming "hereditary defect" in a single generation.
The Oriental family means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead behind them, This idea of the family cultivates sympathetic representation to such a degree that the range of the emotion belonging to such representation may extend, as in Japan, to many groups and sub-groups of living families, and even, in time of national peril, to the whole nation as one great family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism.
Otherwise, it is extremely difficult to understand how the human family can progress and become permanently improved. Galton's law is believed to be approximately correct. It may be stated as follows: Children inherit on the average one-half their characteristics from parents, one-fourth from grandparents, one-eighth from great-grandparents, and so on in ever diminishing ratio to remote ancestors.
And to think, too, that their great-grandparents might have come here when I did. But, no! They wouldn't hear to it. No new country for them, they said. And so they stayed where they were, and the breed has dwindled down to to nothing. I'll be bound they have forgotten how to talk." He turned to the children with a look of inquiry. "Why, of course, rabbits can't talk," said Buster John. Mr.
His terse and picturesque bits of the wisdom and the virtue of this world are familiar in our mouths to-day; they moulded our great-grandparents and their children; they have informed our popular traditions; they still influence our actions, guide our ways of thinking, and establish our points of view, with the constant control of acquired habits which we little suspect.
But though the whole multitude might have been taken, in the mass, for neighbors and acquaintances, there was not a single individual whose exact likeness they had ever before seen. It was a noticeable circumstance, also, that the newest fashioned garment on the backs of these people might have been worn by the great-grandparents of the existing generation.
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