NATURAL HEIRSHIP : OR, ALL THE WORLD AKIN. 381 



one of them would inherit something of his nature. All would be his 

 posterity, one as direct as another. The honorahle and the base, 

 the rich and the poor, the talented and the imbecile, would alike 

 belong to his family, now swelled to gigantic proportions through 

 the multiplying power of time. Broadly speaking, all the inhabit- 

 ants of this country about eight hundred years ago were our fathers 

 and mothers ; all the inhabitants of this country about eight hundred 

 years hence will be our children. 



The low rate of multiplication just given is often seen to be 

 greatly exceeded. The number of grandchildren and of great grand- 

 children which some individuals leave behind them at death makes 

 it easy to believe that in a few centuries an entire nation will be 

 their veritable sons and daughters. While I have been writing this 

 paper an old woman has died very near to my residence at the age of 

 ninety-nine, who had thirteen children and one hundred and two grand- 

 children and great-grandchildren, the latter, so far as known, all liv- 

 ing. During the same time that the paper has been in progress, a 

 Spanish gentleman who went out many years ago to America has re- 

 turned to his own country, bringing back with him no fewer than one 

 hundred and ninety-seven actual descendants. 



A single plant, if unresisted by rival plants and unchecked by 

 such things as climate and situation, would speedily cover the whole 

 earth. Man has really no rival, he is lord of all ; he can live too in 

 every clime, and obtain a livelihood amid tropical forests and amid 

 eternal snows. The rapidity with which the multiplication of de- 

 scendants must go forward, even according to the ordinary rate of 

 progression, will in the course of not many generations make the 

 whole world our children, much more if it be expedited. Successive 

 countries will be captured by various avenues and held in perpetual 

 possession by our posterity. The whole caldron of humanity, seething 

 evermore with new creations, will acknowledge the presence of every 

 individual progenitor of this period. 



The race is incalculably more than the individual. The pecul- 

 iarities of the individual are soon melted away in the general stream 

 of humanity. As if his brief sway in the little circle he has filled 

 were viewed with envy or dissatisfaction, the hand of Time begins 

 immediately to pare down what remains of him in the earth to ever 

 smaller dimensions until it is infinitesimal. He can insure only half 

 of himself in any individual of the next generation, only a quarter in 

 the generation after that, and so on. His part m the building up of 

 any human fabric rapidly becomes insignificant. Something seems 

 bent on working him out. As it does with his name and memorials, 

 filling up the lettering on his tombstone with moss, destroying the 

 writing he has left behind, wiping out all traces of him from the 

 earth, so it does with himself and all that vitally represents his 

 personality in the persons of his descendants. The individual is ever 



