120 The American Naturalist. [February, 
so “ Nature” in this instance, quickly “stamped out insanity 
and idiocy”; the double taint being peculiarly fatal. 
Another sister of Joanna’s married into the Portuguese 
House of Braganza and in Napoleon’s time one of her de- 
scendants—queen in her own right—died raving mad. Nu- 
merous children of Ferdinand and Isabella were sickly and 
died young, and one is inclined to think it would have been 
a “crowning mercy” if all the others had shared the same fate. 
But we must return to the descendants of Joanna who wore 
the Spanish crown. Her son, the Emperor Charles V. of Ger- 
many, was a sovereign of unusual ability, distinguished in 
war and still more in diplomacy. On his father’s side it must 
be remembered that he came of a singularly healthy stock ; 
his grandfather Maximilian had been in his youth a veritable 
hero of romance, brave and chivalrous to a fault, and in the 
guise of a simple knight errant had won the heart and hand 
of his bride, the richest heiress of Europe. We shall meet 
with a great grandson of Maximilian’s who inherited all his 
brilliant qualities; but not in the legitimate line of descent. 
But let us turn our eyes from the potentate who held the 
balance of power in Europe in his hands, to the man who, 
hardly past the prime of life, voluntarily laid down his power, 
and retired to spend his last years in the Convent of Yuste. 
Here, the melancholia which had remained latent during the 
earlier life of Charles V., gradually took possession of him. He 
insisted that his funeral obsequies should be performed, and 
the prayers for the dead read for him as he lay in sackcloth 
and ashes in his coffin in the convent chapel. 
From the shock of this ghastly ceremony the once powerful 
Emperor never recovered ; a fever took possession of him and 
in a few days he breathed his last. 
His successor, Philip II, was one of the most gloomy and 
ferocious bigots the world has ever seen. Like a poisonous 
spider in its web, so from the palace prison to the Escurial, did 
this cruel and treacherous despot devise blackest ruin and 
death, with one stroke of his pen condemning a whole nation 
to death. A determined attempt was made to carry out this 
incredible sentence, which was only frustrated by the most 
