NATURAL HEIRSHIP : OR, ALL THE WORLD AKIN. 379 



scent. Thus, if the father and mother are cousins, their children have 

 only six great-grandparents instead of eight. If the grandfather on 

 the father's side, and the grandfather on the mother's side, were broth- 

 ers, their lines run up into one house, and not two separate houses 

 according to the common rule. Many lines must thus blend in the 

 course of ages, and the multiplication of distinct ancestors be thus 

 somewhat retarded. But, notwithstanding this deduction, it would 

 require a miracle to prevent the interfusion of the blood of a whole 

 nation within a brief period. 



When we have gone back far enough for all the inhabitants of our 

 country to have become related to us as fore-elders, they will be found, 

 as we still travel backward, to go on for the most part intermarrying 

 within the lines of consanguinity as drawn backward from us. The 

 great majoi'ity of the marriages will be, of course, between men and 

 women of the same country and the same race, who, by the operation 

 of the law now expounded, have all been ascertained to be our ances- 

 tors. The boundaries of a country, especially in an island like ours, 

 resemble the shores of a lake from which there is no outlet, and where 

 the currents must circulate round and round the same basin. 



Yet, as the self-contained lake does somehow manage to communi- 

 cate with the great world of waters outside, as, for instance, by rain 

 and by evaporation, so the multiplication of distinct ancestors, while 

 retarded by nationality, is not arrested. Genealogy has curious means 

 of planting new centers in other lands, and commencing there over 

 again the same rapid ratio of multiplication, till successive nationalities 

 are brought into intimate relationship. Let an ancestor be brought 

 into the English succession from another country, and, since he can be 

 shown to be in the course of a few generations related to all the people 

 of that country, forthwith by his marriage here the whole nation to 

 which he belongs is brought into our succession. One Frenchman 

 embodies in himself, in miniature, all the French people of past times ; 

 one negro represents all the race from which he has sprung. Ancestral 

 germs have thus been conveyed across the sea by emigration from 

 France, from Germany, from India, and from the remotest regions to 

 these shores, and by these means all the people of the earth will be 

 found at no very distant period to have been brought into close kinship 

 with us. The Norman conquest brought in all at once a large foreign 

 element, expediting immensely our union with the people of whom 

 they were part. The Danish invasions did the same at an earlier age ; 

 the expatriation of the Huguenots the same much later. All the world 

 are found akin, not by going so far back as Adam, or even Xoah, but 

 within historical times. 



It. is often said, respecting a distant relative, " he is a thirty-second 

 cousin." The truth is, perhaps, that he is a second or third cousin. 

 As to thirty-second cousinship, it is startling to* find that the whole 

 human race comes within this line of consanguinity. By the ordinary 



