382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



losing ; the race is ever gaining. A man's great-great-great-grand- 

 cliild, living scarcely two hundred years after him, will be only one 

 thirty-second part of himself, and the other thirty-one parts will be 

 due to others, that is, to the race viewed as something opposed to his 

 individuality. 



The gain in the way of extension compensates for the loss of inten- 

 sion. While a man's part in the individuals descending from him rap- 

 idly becomes infinitesimal, the number of individuals in whom he has 

 part rapidly increases until it includes, as we have seen, all the nation 

 and then all the world. This widening out of his personality corre- 

 sponds to the broadening of intelligence from mere interest in local 

 news to that which is taken in scientific generalizations, and to the tend- 

 ency of moral development which is to expand the love of family into 

 patriotism, and then to convert patriotism into philanthropy, into a 

 regard for man as man, irrespective of language or nationality. Thus 

 the brook seeks the river, the river the sea, the sea the vast ocean. 



Each man's personality, it has to be remembered, is borrowed from 

 those behind him. The further back in time a man's place may be, the 

 fewer ancestors he has behind him ; the greater, too, his own part in 

 the race, view^ed as a whole existent through the ages, the oftener the 

 infinitesimal resowing of him takes place, and the greater becomes the 

 certainty that every separate inhabitant of the earth is one of his de- 

 scendants. Furthermore, when there are fewer people, the lines of 

 ancestry blend oftener, so that in the same individual it is more proba- 

 ble that an ancestor will be represented many times by means of 

 different channels of descent meeting in him after proceeding from the 

 same source. Posterity, not very remote, will have descended from a 

 common ancestor through several of his children . A progenitor's 

 part who lived three thousand years ago is very much larger 

 than that of one who lived only one hundred or three hundred years 

 ago. He has had more to do in the shaping and molding of the 

 whole, just as the stem has more to do in the formation of the tree than 

 any particular branch proceeding from it. The root or the seed has a 

 still greater part, and, if it be conceded that the human race has pro- 

 ceeded from one common pair, it follows that of the nature of all the 

 individuals now living half is of the proto-father and half of the first 

 raothcr. To us existing at this late date, it is interesting to note how 

 the channels of vitality, proceeding from the original pair to us, first 

 diverge until they reach their numerical climax, and are coincident for 

 a considerable period with all the inhabitants of the world ; then con- 

 verge until they are found reduced to two again in the household from 

 which we immediately sprang. 



As the people at no very distant date in the past were all our fa- 

 thers and mothers, and the people who will be living not very far distant 

 in the future will be all our sons and daughters, so the people living at the 

 present time are all our near relations. We may call them, with very 



