224 CONTINUITY. 



multiply by two for each thirty years, the average duration of 

 a generation, and it will give the above result. 



Let anyone assume that one of his ancestors at the time 

 of the Norman Conquest was a Moor, another a Celt, and a 

 third a Laplander, and that the remains of these three were 

 preserved, while those of all the others were lost, he would 

 never recognise either of them as his ancestor ; he would only 

 have the one-hundred millionth of the blood of each of them, 

 and, as far as they were concerned, there would be no per- 

 ceptible sign of identity of race. 



But the problem is more complex than that which I have 

 stated. At the time of the Conquest there were hardly a 

 hundred million people in Europe : it follows that a great 

 number of the ancestors of the propositus must have inter- 

 married with relations, and then the pedigree, going back to 

 the time of the Conquest, instead of being represented by 

 diverging lines, would form a network so tangled that no 

 skill could unravel it. The law of probabilities would indicate 

 that any two people in the same country, taken at hazard, 

 would not have many generations to go back before they 

 would find a common ancestor, who, probably, could they 

 have seen him or her in the life, had no traceable resemblance 

 to either of them. Thus, two animals of a very different 

 form, and of what would be termed very different species, 

 might have a common geological ancestor, and yet the skill 

 of no comparative anatomist could trace the descent. 



From the long-continued conventional habit of tracing 

 pedigrees through the male ancestor, we forget, in talking of 

 progenitors, that each individual has a mother as well as a 

 father, and there is no reason to suppose that he has in him 

 less of the blood of the one than of the other. 



The recent discoveries in palaeontology show us that Man 

 existed on this planet at an epoch far anterior to that com- 

 monly assigned to him. The instruments connected with 

 human remains, and indisputably the work of human hands, 

 show that to these remote periods the term civilisation could 

 hardly be applied chipped flints of the rudest construction, 

 probably, in the earlier cases, fabricated by holding an amor- 

 phous flint in the hand and chipping off portions of it by 



