144 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
mainly responsible for the difference between Roundhead 
and Cavalier, between Royalist and Puritan. Round- 
heads and Puritans were descended from daughters and 
younger brothers. The “blue blood” flows oniy in the 
veins of the eldest son. But the eldest son of the eldest 
son forms but a very small fragment of the whole. 
Galton’s remark to the effect that the character of Eng- 
land has suffered through the segregation of its strong- 
est representatives as nobility and their exposure to the 
deteriorating influences of ease and unearned power is 
scarcely justified. A few individuals have suffered, but 
not England. They are only the conspicuous few. The 
rest have joined the mass of common men whose great- 
ness makes England great. 
One of the many daughters of some king marries a 
nobleman; a later scion of nobility is joined to some 
squire; some daughter of a squire is 
married to a farmer. The farmer’s chil- 
dren thus have royal blood in their 
veins. Or, by reverse process, plebeian blood may 
enter—and to its advantage—the bluest of nobility. 
The thirty generations since William’s time each con- 
tain a far and wide mixture of blood. That the de- 
scendants of these crosses are alive to-day indicates 
that in the main each individual has a sound heredity. 
‘For a rotten link means the breaking of the chain. 
‘Even royal blood is not necessarily degenerate. That 
, which was so has been strengthened by plebeian strains. 
There can be few if any Englishmen or Americans to- 
day but have royal blood in their veins. There is 
probably not a king living who has not somewhere 
in his ancestry the bar sinister of the common peas- 
ant. For of one blood, after all, are all the nations 
of the earth, as well as the men that make up these 
nations. 
Effect of 
primogeniture. 
