374 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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: Eng- 

 land (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. 



I. Evidence from House of Hanover in England. 



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 Hohen- 

 zollerns in Prussia, but he himself was nothing. From his time to the 

 present the following unions have been made with the results of intro- 

 ducing 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 



* No genius means that no individuals worthy of grade 9 or 10 for 

 intellect are to be found. 



