THE LAWS OF HEREDITY 



ing, in which are combined the strains of many 

 remarkable individuals; for in addition to those 

 already mentioned the pedigree shows, in the 

 third generation, two other remarkable women, 

 Eleanor d'Olbreuze and Louisa Henrietta of 

 Orange, the latter a descendant of the Great Wil- 

 liam the Silent and the only less celebrated Gas- 

 pard the Second. 



The blood of William the Silent appears in 

 three other strains of the pedigree, and that of 

 Mary Queen of Scots in two strains. 



In a word, there is scarcely an undistin- 

 guished male among the forty individuals who 

 represent Frederick's ancestors within five gen- 

 erations ; the fact that these are but forty, instead 

 of the normal sixty-two individuals, in itself re- 

 veals graphically the extent to which the vari- 

 ous strains of this distinguished ancestry are 

 interwoven through an intricate web of inbreed- 

 ing. 



The progeny of this extraordinary experiment 

 in eugenics reveal, in the generation upon which 

 our attention is focused, not only Frederick II, 

 one of that small select company of all time who 

 by common consent are surnamed "the Great/' 

 but a brother Henry and a sister Amelia almost 

 equally gifted, and a sister, Sophia Ulrica, who 

 may be said to stand fully on a par in intel- 

 lectual endowment with her illustrious brother, 

 and who as Queen of Sweden was known as i ' the 

 Minerva of the North," and became the mother 

 of the famous Gustavus III. 



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