Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/380

374 the Great, but these have been rigorously kept out, in order to make the standard as impersonal as possible.

By starting with the present king of England and including all his ancestors to four generations, and then all the other descendants of these ancestors, all their wives and their ancestors, and stretching out in every direction by this endless chain method, taking every one about whom enough could be found to be satisfactory, I have at present obtained mental and moral descriptions of 633 interrelated individuals, including pretty completely the following countries of Europe: England (House of Hanover), France, Prussia, Brunswick, Hesse-Cassel, Holstein, Saxe-Coburg, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Savoy, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands. The period covered extends in general back to about the sixteenth century, but in the case of Spain and Portugal to the eleventh century.

Let us take up the countries separately and study the quality of the blood introduced into the royal families and its relation to the character of the subsequent breed and to the history of the land itself.

George I. was a rather weak, dull and indifferent scion of a gifted stock. He was descended from the brilliant House of Orange, which we shall afterwards see was able to form the greatness of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, but he himself was nothing. From his time to the present the following unions have been made with the results of introducing the following stocks:

 Brunswick, stock pretty good, no genius. George II. $$=$$ Brandenburg, stock good, no genius. Frederick Prince of Wales $$=$$ Augusta of Saxe-Coburg, stock good, no genius. George III. $$=$$ Charlotte of Mecklenburg, stock 'obscure,' good, no genius. Edward Duke of Kent $$=$$ Victoria Maria Louisa, of Saxe-Coburg, stock excellent, no genius, strong literary bent. Queen Victoria $$=$$ Albert of Saxe-Coburg, stock excellent, no genius, strong literary bent. Edward VII. $$=$$ Alexandria of Denmark, stock excellent, no genius.

Thus from George the First's time on, there has never been any genius introduced into the pedigree of the House of Hanover, and, as we all know, none has appeared in any of the descendants bearing the name. So as regards high mental attainments, we have what we might expect, dullness the characteristic, with here and there fairly good