142 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
great network. It is certain that the blood of each per- 
son in Alfred’s time who left capable descendants is 
represented in every family of England of strict Eng- 
lish descent. In other words, every Englishman is de- 
scended from Alfred the Great; as very likely also 
from the peasant women whose cakes Alfred is reputed 
to have allowed to burn. Moreover, there are few if 
any who do not share the blood of William the Con- 
queror, and most ancestral lines, if they could be traced, 
would go back to him by a hundred different strains. 
In fact, there are few families in the south and east 
of England who have not more Norman blood than 
the present royal family. The house of Guelph holds 
the throne not through nearness to William, but 
through primogeniture, a thing very different from 
heredity. 
Mr. Edward J. Edwards, of Minneapolis, has re- 
cently sent me some very interesting studies in gene- 
alogy yet unpublished. These concern the lineage 
of his little daughter, my niece, Mary Stockton Ed- 
wards. 
Mr. Edwards find that the little girl, like millions of 
others, is descended through at least two different lines 
from William the Conqueror, The line- 
age, on the one hand, leads back in 
thirty-two generations through the fam- 
ily names of Jordan, Hawley, Waldo, Elderkin, Drake, 
Grenville, Courteney, de Bohun, and Plantagenet to Wil- 
liam. Sir Humphrey de Bohun married Elizabeth Plan- 
tagenet, daughter of King Edward I. In the ancestry 
of King Edward are the Saxon kings Cedric, Egbert, 
Alfred, and Ethelred, while intermarriage with other 
royal lines brings in Hengest, Hugh Capet, Charlemagne, 
Otho the Great, Duncan, Rurik, Igor, San Fernando, and 
a host of other notables of whom one would have less 
Lineage of a 
little girl. 
