Social Consequences of Heredity. 373 



complex elaboration whence results the living being, so many 

 laws are superimposed on one another, intersect one another, 

 strengthen and neutralize one another ; so many accidental facts 

 intervene, often so as to confuse and destroy the whole, that the 

 resemblance of children to parents is never more than approxima- 

 tive. Experience alone can decide whether this is sufficient or 

 insufficient, whether the law has been stronger than the exceptions, 

 or the exceptions than the law. But to submit nobility to the 

 control of experience and to discuss its title at each accession 

 by birth, would amount in fact to its suppression. But even if 

 we admit that the law is stronger than the exceptions, and that 

 the physical and moral qualities of the ancestors are transmitted 

 to the descendants, there remains nevertheless another shoal on 

 which the institution of nobility must wreck itself the enfeeble- 

 ment produced by heredity. 



' The citizens of the ancient republics/ says Littre, ' were never 

 able to maintain themselves by reproduction. The nine thousand 

 Spartans of Lycurgus's time were reduced to nineteen hundred in 

 the time of Aristotle. The people of Athens were often com- 

 pelled to recruit their numbers by the admission of foreigners. 

 Nor has the course of things been different in modern times. All 

 aristocracies, all close corporations that fill up their ranks solely 

 from among themselves, have suffered gradual losses which would 

 have caused a certain reduction were it not for the additions made 

 from time to time. There is not in Europe a single national 

 nobility the majority of which dates from considerable antiquity.' 1 



Benoiston de Chateauneuf, in a curious Memoire statistique stir 

 la dur'ee des families nobles en France, shows that the average 

 duration is not more than three hundred years. He finds the 

 causes of this in primogeniture, consanguineous marriages, and, 

 above all, war and duelling. We must, however, believe that 

 the fact is regulated by more general causes, for the same 

 author admits that his researches into the extinction of mer- 

 cantile families and those of the lower classes have led to the 

 same results. Of four hundred and eighty-seven families admitted 

 into the citizenship of Berne between the years 1583 and 1654, 



1 De la Philosophic Positive, 1845. 



