APPENDIX F, 241 



F. 



PROBABLE EXTINCTION OF FAMILIES. 1 



The decay of the families of men who occupied conspicuous posi- 

 tions in past times has been a subject of frequent remark, and has 

 given rise to various conjectures. It is not only the families of men 

 of genius or those of the aristocracy who tend to perish, but it is 

 those of all with whom history deals, in any way, even such men 

 as the burgesses of towns, concerning whom Mr. Doubleday has 

 inquired and written. The instances are very numerous in which 

 surnames that were once common have since become scarce or have 

 wholly disappeared. The tendency is universal, and, in explanation 

 of it, the conclusion has been hastily drawn that a rise in physical 

 comfort and intellectual capacity is necessarily accompanied by 

 diminution in "fertility" — using that phrase in its widest sense 

 and reckoning abstinence from marriage as one cause of sterility. 

 If that conclusion be true, our population is chiefly maintained 

 through the "proletariat," and thus a large element of degradation 

 is inseparably connected with those other elements which tend to 

 ameliorate the race. On the other hand, M. Alphonse de Candolle 

 has directed attention to the fact that, by the ordinary law of 

 chances, a large proportion of families are continually dying out, 

 and it evidently follows that, until we know what that proportion is, 

 we cannot estimate whether any observed diminution of sur- 

 names among the families whose history we can trace, is or is not a 

 sign of their diminished "fertility." I give extracts from M. De 

 Candolle' s work in a foot-note, 2 and may add that, although I have 

 not hitherto published anything on the matter, I took considerable 

 pains some years ago to obtain numerical results in respect to this 



1 Reprinted, with slight revision, from the Journ. Anthropol. Inst. 1888. 



2 " Au milieu des renseignements precis et des opinions tres-sensees de 

 MM. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, Galton, et autres statisticiens, je n'ai pas ren- 

 contre la reflexion bien importante qn'ils auraient du faire de 1' extinction inevitable 

 des noms de famille. Evidemment tous les noms doivent s'eteindre .... Un 

 mathematicien pourrait calculer comment la reduction des noms ou titres aurait 

 lieu, d'apres la probabilite des naissances toutes feminines oil toutes masculines 

 ou melangees et la probabilite d'absence de naissances dans un couple quelconque," 

 &c. — Alphonse de Candolle, Hidoire des Sciences et des Savants, 1873. 



P, 



