THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. 141 



tried to conceal him," Richard Roe may receive a noble 

 heritage. Doubtless it may be passed on to the next 

 generation, not the less noble because it has not been 

 exposed to the distortions of fame. Real greatness is 

 as often the expression of the wisdom of the mother as 

 of anything the father may have been or done. B' and 

 X' are just as potent as B and X, though less known to 

 the public. As society is now constituted, the great 

 hearts and brains of the future may be looked for any- 

 where. They will not fail to come when needed, and 

 in most cases they will appear unheralded by ancestral 

 notoriety. 



I made the statement above that Richard Roe had 

 twice as many ancestors as his father or his mother. 



This is self-evident, but it is not literally 

 Counting one's ^^^^ r^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ f^.^^ ^^^ ■^^^^^_ 



3.nccsto]*s 



locking of families. Over and over 

 again in any line of ancestry strains of blood have 

 crossed, and the same person, and therefore the whole 

 of this person's ancestors, will be found in different 

 places in the individual pedigree. This must happen 

 dozens of times in most lines of ancestry. The lack of 

 old records obscures this fact. That something of the 

 sort must occur is evident from the fact that the child 

 of to-day must have had at the time of Alfred the Great 

 an ancestry of 870,672,000,000 persons. In the time of 

 William the Conqueror (thirty generations) this number 

 reaches 8,598,094,592. This is shown by the ordinary 

 process of computation — two parents, four grandparents, 

 eight great-grandparents, and so on. As the aggregate 

 of Englishmen in Alfred's time, or even in William's, was 

 but a very small fraction of these numbers, most of these 

 ancestors must have been repeated many times in the 

 calculation. Each person who leaves descendants is a 

 link in the great chain of life, or rather a strand in life's 



