THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. I4I 
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 
true. The error comes from the inter- 
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 
Counting one’s 
ancestors. 
