182 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I attribute in part to the constant struggle between the rival families, 

 between brothers of the same family and other close relatives, in their 

 jealous greed for power and domain, thus keeping up a struggle for 

 existence, capable of showing itself in results, and partly to fortuitous 

 chance endowing the heir to the throne with the qualities of the 

 stronger rather than the weaker of his ancestry. The number of 

 weak or indolent is correspondingly small, though high temper, 

 jealousy and ambition are present in nearly all. 



I find about six persons to whom the terms feeble, characterless 

 and indolent, are applied. Two of these, Andrew II., King of Hun- 

 gary, and Ferdinand IV., of Castile, are apart from the others. The 

 remaining four are very closely related, being father, son, nephew 

 and his son. These are John I., John II., Henry IV. of Castile and 

 Ferdinand I. of Aragon. 



The family had already existed twelve generations before these 

 characteristics appeared in it. In the tenth generation one of the 

 greatest names is found in Ferdinand IV., and even in the nineteenth 

 and twenty-first generations some of the best and most vigorous and 

 ambitious appear in Ferdinand, Isabella and the Emperor Charles, all 

 of whom were the descendants of the privileged few with a pedigree 

 practically entirely of this sort extending back through more than 

 twenty generations on all sides, and including many thousands of 

 nobles titles. 



These names which close the group are as great as those which 

 opened it. How can this be if the assumption of rank and power is 

 to lead to degeneration? It may be argued that the necessity for 

 action in these times of incessant strife obliged the individuals to 

 be energetic and so the characters were the product of their times, 

 but we have seen that the selection alone would produce this. Further- 

 more, against the environment explanation we must remember the 

 great number of able and vigorous men who appear much later in his- 

 tory in other countries and the descendants of forty instead of twenty 

 generations of blue-bloods. The modern Saxe-Coburg-Gotha chart 

 is almost entirely free from weaknesses and indolence. 



The insanity apparently starts in Peter the Cruel. We have seen 

 how his character might well have been the result of a combination 

 of a large number of cruel persons. This insanity continually re- 

 appeared in Spain, where one finds it most rampant. It occasionally 

 appeared in Austria, where it was less often introduced. It probably 

 was also the origin of the Plantagenet neurosis, the full history of 

 which I have not yet had time to study with any completeness. 



