Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/393

Rh one of them would inherit something of his nature. All would be his posterity, one as direct as another. The honorable and the base, the rich and the poor, the talented and the imbecile, would alike belong to his family, now swelled to gigantic proportions through the multiplying power of time. Broadly speaking, all the inhabitants of this country about eight hundred years ago were our fathers and mothers; all the inhabitants of this country about eight hundred years hence will be our children.

The low rate of multiplication just given is often seen to be greatly exceeded. The number of grandchildren and of great grandchildren which some individuals leave behind them at death makes it easy to believe that in a few centuries an entire nation will be their veritable sons and daughters. While I have been writing this paper an old woman has died very near to my residence at the age of ninety-nine, who had thirteen children and one hundred and two grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the latter, so far as known, all living. During the same time that the paper has been in progress, a Spanish gentleman who went out many years ago to America has returned to his own country, bringing back with him no fewer than one hundred and ninety-seven actual descendants.

A single plant, if unresisted by rival plants and unchecked by such things as climate and situation, would speedily cover the whole earth. Man has really no rival, he is lord of all; he can live too in every clime, and obtain a livelihood amid tropical forests and amid eternal snows. The rapidity with which the multiplication of descendants must go forward, even according to the ordinary rate of progression, will in the course of not many generations make the whole world our children, much more if it be expedited. Successive countries will be captured by various avenues and held in perpetual possession by our posterity. The whole caldron of humanity, seething evermore with new creations, will acknowledge the presence of every individual progenitor of this period.

The race is incalculably more than the individual. The peculiarities of the individual are soon melted away in the general stream of humanity. As if his brief sway in the little circle he has filled were viewed with envy or dissatisfaction, the hand of Time begins immediately to pare down what remains of him in the earth to ever smaller dimensions until it is infinitesimal. He can insure only half of himself in any individual of the next generation, only a quarter in the generation after that, and so on. His part in the building up of any human fabric rapidly becomes insignificant. Something seems bent on working him out. As it does with his name and memorials, filling up the lettering on his tombstone with moss, destroying the writing he has left behind, wiping out all traces of him from the earth, so it does with himself and all that vitally represents his personality in the persons of his descendants. The individual is ever