Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/391

Rh. Thus, if the father and mother are cousins, their children have only six great-grandparents instead of eight. If the grandfather on the father's side, and the grandfather on the mother's side, were brothers, their lines run up into one house, and not two separate houses according to the common rule. Many lines must thus blend in the course of ages, and the multiplication of distinct ancestors be thus somewhat retarded. But, notwithstanding this deduction, it would require a miracle to prevent the interfusion of the blood of a whole nation within a brief period,

When we have gone back far enough for all the inhabitants of our country to have become related to us as fore-elders, they will be found, as we still travel backward, to go on for the most part intermarrying within the lines of consanguinity as drawn backward from us. The great majority of the marriages will be, of course, between men and women of the same country and the same race, who, by the operation of the law now expounded, have all been ascertained to be our ancestors. The boundaries of a country, especially in an island like ours, resemble the shores of a lake from which there is no outlet, and where the currents must circulate round and round the same basin.

Yet, as the self-contained lake does somehow manage to communicate with the great world of waters outside, as, for instance, by rain and by evaporation, so the multiplication of distinct ancestors, while retarded by nationality, is not arrested. Genealogy has curious means of planting new centers in other lands, and commencing there over again the same rapid ratio of multiplication, till successive nationalities are brought into intimate relationship. Let an ancestor be brought into the English succession from another country, and, since he can be shown to be in the course of a few generations related to all the people of that country, forthwith by his marriage here the whole nation to which he belongs is brought into our succession. One Frenchman embodies in himself, in miniature, all the French people of past times; one negro represents all the race from which he has sprung. Ancestral germs have thus been conveyed across the sea by emigration from France, from Germany, from India, and from the remotest regions to these shores, and by these means all the people of the earth will be found at no very distant period to have been brought into close kinship with us. The Norman conquest brought in all at once a large foreign element, expediting immensely our union with the people of whom they were part. The Danish invasions did the same at an earlier age; the expatriation of the Huguenots the same much later. All the world are found akin, not by going so far back as Adam, or even Noah, but within historical times.

It is often said, respecting a distant relative, "he is a thirty-second cousin." The truth is, perhaps, that he is a second or third cousin. As to thirty-second cousinship, it is startling to find that the whole human race comes within this line of consanguinity. By the ordinary