264 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



because this same family is usually considered to have run out through 

 external circumstances and to have followed an easy road from opulence 

 and luxury to indolence and decline. 



I shall show that among all the races considered in this book a 

 family never runs out except by selection, no matter what the condi- 

 tion of environment may be. It is far from my wish to assume that 

 environment has done nothing in molding these characters, and espe- 

 cially the moral characters that fall under this group of modern 

 Spain. If it has done much in order to account for a considerable 

 number of excellent ones, and these often as good as any princes that 

 have ever lived, we must assume that it, like the pedigree, was cal- 

 culated to bring great variations. This probability will be discussed 

 when all the greater groups are compared one with the other. If 

 environment did have much to do with molding their individual 

 destinies there is no apparent culminated inherited effect from it. 

 After five or six generations the people are practically neither worse 

 nor better than at first. 



Nineteenth century estimates had no effect in lessening the cruelty 

 and arrogance of Ferdinand II., 'Bomba.' He was as bad a tyrant 

 as ever lived in the middle ages. His son was a man of the same type. 

 The conditions in Portugal and Spain were not very different from 

 those in Italy where Ferdinand lived, and yet Portugal and Spain 

 show us nothing to be compared with the brutalities of this father 

 and son. Ferdinand II. was no more a tyrant than his grandmother 

 or some others among the Hapsburgs; Francis of Modena, for in- 

 stance. Carlotta alone of those belonging to the immediate branch 

 of the throne of Spain (occurring in the middle of the chart) would 

 be rightly characterized by the word tyrant. Yet the conditions in 

 Spain for the formation of an autocrat might be justly considered as 

 conducive to this effect as were those of Italy. It will be noticed that 

 the branches in Spain are practically free from this tyrannical type, 

 except that Carlotta, daughter of Charles III., showed something of 

 this character, and one of her sons, Migual, exhibited it in a high 

 degree. She was one among four children to show the violent type. 

 On the other or left side of the chart where the blood of the tyran- 

 nical Caroline of Austria is closest, we have Bomba and Carlotta, 

 two of the same type in three children, and also Henrique, one in 

 two, and Francis II., one in one. Imitation may have played a role, 

 but then why did a certain definite number imitate and only a certain 

 number do so? 



What shall we say here of free-will? How could it have played 

 any appreciable part in molding the characters of these scores of people, 

 each apparently filling a little link in a chain, the destinies of which 



