584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



branch, not onlv of the family of the man who first bore his name, but 

 of progenitors hidden still deeper in the mists of antiquity. We so 

 often hear of families either dying out altogether or ending in females, 

 that we come to think that such a fate is the eventual end of all fami- 

 lies ; but this is far from being the case. Every man living could, if 

 he only knew where to find the data, count up from son to father, from 

 father to grandfather, from generation to generation, until he came to 

 Adam himself. And this is the great difference between good families 

 and families of all other kinds : the members of a good family can tell 

 who their forefathers were, where they lived, and whom they married ; 

 while those who belong to no families in particular are classed in a 

 body as those who don't know their own grandfathers, or who perhaps 

 never had any to know. The goodness of a family depends much more 

 on the number of its known generations than on any other condition. 

 Given two families in which the numbers of recorded generations are 

 equal, doubtless the family whose members have been the more illustri- 

 ous would be reckoned the better of the two ; but a family of only two 

 or three generations, however illustrious their members might have 

 been, would certainly not constitute what is known as a good family. 

 As in the case of many popular ideas, there is some little substratum 

 of reason in this belief. If to be educated and cultivated is an object 

 of ambition, and if there is anything in the doctrine of heredity, it may 

 be supposed that the members of a family who have been of impor- 

 tance enough to leave their names scattered on the bank of the river of 

 time have had a better chance of being polished, and of handing down 

 their good qualities to their posterity, than those who were swept away 

 by the tide without leaving any mark. 



It is not much to be wondered at that there is such a general misti- 

 ness as to the ancestors of any particular person. I wonder how many 

 readers of this page can tell straight off the Christian names of their 

 two grandmothers very few, I suspect and yet these are facts very 

 close at home in any one's genealogy. I am sure no one who has not 

 especially looked up the point could tell the Christian names of his 

 great-grandmothers, though they also stand at the threshold of a pedi- 

 gree. Unless recorded in the family Bible or otherwise committed to 

 writing, such names soon fade from the memory. People are anxious 

 enough that they themselves shall not be forgotten. Such a feeling is 

 the root of all ambition ; and there is a difference in degree only, not 

 in kind, between writing one's name on the page of the history of one's 

 country and carving one's initials on a wooden bench, or scribbling them 

 with pencil on the walls of some famous and frequented house. But 

 r people are not so desirous to perpetuate their father's memory, or to 

 hand down to future ages their grandfather's name, and they take no 

 steps to that end ; and the consequence is that of the mass of the peo- 

 ple below the class immortalized in such books as Burke's " Landed 

 Gentry," but few know whence they come, or anything at all about 



