302 Heredity. 



Short, Charlemagne ; in the latter it attains its most perfect develop- 

 ment, and then it declines. The third race starts with Robert the 

 Strong, Count of France, reaches its climax in Philip Augustus, 

 St. Louis, and Philip the Fair, and then it becomes extinct in 

 three obscure kings. It is much the same with the Valois branch, 

 sprung from Charles de Valois, son of Philippe le Hardi, and 

 with the Angouleme branch, sprang from Louis d'Orle'ans, son of 

 Charles V., which ended with the feeble sons of Catherine de 

 Me'dicis. Then come the Bourbons, whose climax is indicated 

 by Henri IV. and Louis XIV., and who ever since have been on 

 the decline. So, too, with the Guises, Conde's, etc. Nor are those 

 families exempt from this law who have acted a great part, only on 

 a small stage,' in their own province or their own city. Indeed, it 

 would not perhaps be inexact to say, with Dr. Lucas, that * the 

 ascending movement of the exalted faculties of most founders of 

 families is nearly always arrested at the third generation, seldom 

 goes on to the fourth, and hardly ever transcends the fifth/ So it 

 is, too, with nations. Their origin is obscure , they grow, attain the 

 full measure of their power, and then their fate brings them to 

 that period where they belong only to history ; and their decadence 

 is due, not so much to those vague causes to which it is commonly 

 attributed by historians, as to a definite cause: the decay of the 

 faculties, physical, intellectual, and moral (and of the organic 

 functions which are their condition), if not in all the citizens, at 

 least in the majority of them. 



Heredity plays its part in this decline. Though by itself, as we 

 have seen, it can do nothing, being merely a conservative tendency, 

 still it is heredity alone that makes progress possible during the 

 ascendant epoch of evolution. But then, on the other hand, after 

 evolution has entered on its downward period, heredity confirms 

 and regulates the decline. One by one it laid fatefully, blindly 

 the courses of the edifice, and one after another it removes them 

 with the same blind fatality. 



The influence of heredity is either direct or indirect. 



Its direct influence is exerted through the state of marriage. It 

 is not a rare occurrence for a man of note to marry a woman of 

 indifferent capacity, out of family or social considerations, or from 

 chance or caprice. It has been observed that great men often 



