Nor didst thou bate of hope till launch'd from Spain, 'Rising out of the sea behind the galley were two rocks crowned by the Pillars of Hercules, which bore this distich in Latin :— "The columns of great Hercules thou tookest for thy sign; These, monster-queller of our age, of right indeed were thine." The inscription on the splendid monument of the Escorial, raised to him by his son, is in the following words : : "HUNC LOCUM SI QUIS POSTER. CAROLO V. HABITAM GLORIAM RERUM GESTARUM SPLENDORE SUPERAVEris, IPSE SOLUS OCCUPATO, CETERI REVERENTER ABSTINETE.' "Thou alone of the children of Charles V. who shalt surpass the glory of his actions take his place: ye others reverently forbear."' But it was not, says Sir William, only in pulpit panegyric or in pompous epitaph that tributes to the Emperor are found. The homage which he received from those who followed his fortunes was equally accorded by those who feared his power and strove to foil his policy. Christendom,' said the Venetian Cavalli in 1551, has seen no prince since Charlemagne so valiant or so great as this Emperor Charles.' The traditionary worship of his memory remained fresh in the evil and degenerate days of his house. It is our maxim in the Council of State,' said the second Don John of Austria, his son's great-grandson, and in 1679 Prime Minister of the last Austrian King of Spain, always to consult the spirit of our great Charles V., and in every difficult crisis to consider what he would have done, and endeavour to do the like.' The greatest artists, the most illustrious historians, have vied with one another in preserving the likeness of his person and the record of his achievements. Nor is it a small addition to his fame. that in this our age, the taste, the learning, and the munificence of a Scottish gentleman, aided by the arts of the nineteenth century, should have raised this literary monument to his greatness. 6 as showing that the result cannot be due, as some authors have supposed, to mere coincidence, but must be consequent on the members of the same family inheriting something in common in their constitution. Let it be assumed that in a large population a particular affection occurs on an average in one out of a million, so that the à priori chance that an individual taken at random will be so affected is only one in a million. Let the population consist of sixty millions, composed, we will assume, of ten million families, each containing six members. On these data, Professor Stokes has calculated for me that the odds will be no less than 8,333 millions to one that in the ten million families there will not be even a single family in which one parent and two children will be affected by the peculiarity in question. But numerous cases could be given, in which several children have been affected by the same rare peculiarity with one of their parents; and in this case, more especially if the grandchildren be included in the calculation, the odds against mere coincidence become something prodigious, almost beyond calculation.'* Mr. Darwin here vindicates the popular belief in the heritable character of physical peculiarities in a manner which clenches, as it were, the demonstration, by showing that an ingenious and complicated art has been created and carried to a high pitch of perfection, is based on no scientific principle-for no philosopher has as yet shown, or even indicated, the latent causes or laws of such transmission from parent to offspring—but simply on experience as familiar to the ancients as to ourselves; as familiar to one race of mankind as to another; as familiar to the cottage dame who registers the sayings and doings of the families of her gossips, as to the antiquary who traces family features and coincidences in the history of the Bourbons, or the Stuarts, or in the pages of the British peerage. The whole subject, in the impressive words of Sir Henry Holland, forms only one chapter, and as yet a dark one, in the philosophy of the great mystery of generation. The transmission, not merely of life, but of likeness, from parents to offspring, involves and includes every question on the subject. It would be futile to raise a difficulty as to a part, when the 'whole is inaccessible to our inquiry. While we find cause for 'wonder at the transmission of resemblances from parent to offspring, we must admit the wonder to be equal that there should be ever deviation from this likeness, and that such ⚫ deviation should be so little governed by any apparent rule or law. The one case is in reality as great a miracle to our ' understanding as the other.' And hence, to recur once more ( Variation of Animals and Plants, vol. ii. ch. 12. † Medical Notes and Reflections. 6 to the language of Mr. Darwin, we are led to look at inhe'ritance as the rule, and non-inheritance as the exception.' Before we proceed to the more direct purpose of our inquiry, let us, by way of giving an instance which shall illustrate both the transmission of remarkable physical peculiarities and the importance which attaches to its investigation, cite a remarkable episodical passage in Mr. Galton's inquiries. Nothing is more familiar to our ordinary experience and comment, quite irrespective of philosophical research, than the notion that fertility is hereditary in particular families, especially among the females. That to marry into such or such a family is a probable way to insure a numerous issue, is what we may call elementary knowledge of the gossip order. Now if the virtue of fecundity be hereditary, the contrary defect, sterility, is certainly likely to be so likewise. And Mr. Galton, remarking, as others have done, the notorious fact of the rapid extinction of British peerages, was led to suggest a cause for it which had not, so far as we are aware, been noticed before, and which seems to go some way towards accounting for it. The subjects chosen for his analysis in this instance are the descendants of thirty-one judges who obtained peerages, and who last sate on the Bench previous to the reign of George IV.' 'In order to obtain an answer to these inquiries, I examined into the number of children and grandchildren of all the thirty-one peers, and into the particulars of their alliances, and tabulated them; when, to my astonishment, I found a very simple, adequate, and novel expla nation of the common cause of extinction of peerages stare me in the face. It appeared in the first instance, that a considerable proportion of the new peers and of their sons married heiresses. Their motives for doing so are intelligible enough, and not to be condemned. They have a title, and perhaps a sufficient fortune, to transmit to their eldest son; but they want an increase of possessions for the endowment of their younger sons and their daughters. On the other hand, an heiress has a fortune, but wants a title. Thus the peer and heiress are urged to the same issue of marriage by different impulses. But my statistical lists showed, with unmistakable emphasis, that these marriages are peculiarly unprolific. We might, indeed, have expected that an heiress, who is the sole issue of a marriage, would not be so fertile as a woman who has many brothers and sisters. Comparative infertility must be hereditary in the same way as other physical attributes; and I am assured it is so in the case of the domestic animals. Consequently, the issue of a peer's marriage with an heiress frequently fails, and his title is brought to an end.' After proceeding to illustrate these propositions by a list of every case in the first or second generation of the law lords, taken from the English judges (who last sate on the Bench previous to the close of the reign of George IV.), where there has been a marriage with an heiress or a co-heiress, he sums the result as follows: : up 1. Out of thirty-one peerages, there were no less than seventeen in which the hereditary influence of an heiress or co-heiress affected the first or second generation. This influence was sensibly an agent in producing sterility in sixteen out of these seventeen peerages, and the influences were sometimes shown in two, three, or more cases in one peerage. 2. The direct male lines of no less than eight peerages, viz. Colepepper, Harcourt, Worthington, Clarendon, Jeffreys, Raymond, Trevor, and Rosslyn, were actually extinguished through the influence of the heiresses; and six others, viz. Shaftesbury, Cowper, Guilford, Parker, Camden, and Talbot, had very narrow escapes from extinction owing to the same cause.' Mr. Galton traces the same cause of decay through the family history of statesmen-peers, and proceeds:— The important result disclosed by these facts, that intermarriage with heiresses is a notable agent in the extinction of families, is confirmed by more extended inquiries. I devoted some days to ransacking Burke's volumes on the extant and on the extinct peerages. I first tried the marriages made by the second peers of each extant title. It seemed reasonable to expect that the eldest son of the first peer, the founder of the title, would marry heiresses pretty frequently; and so they do, and with terrible destruction to their race I find that among the wives of peers, 100 who are heiresses have 208 sons and 206 daughters: 100 who are not heiresses have 336 sons and 284 daughters . . . One-fifth of the heiresses have no male children at all; a full third have not more than one child (male child, we suppose, though this is not specified); three-fifths have not more than two. It has been the salvation of many families that the husband outlived the heiress whom he first married, and was able to leave issue by a second wife.' (Pp. 131–138.) We will contrast the results thus obtained with those produced by a little investigation of our own. Sovereign princes are, as a rule, unlikely to marry heiresses. This particular impediment to fertility is not likely to exist among them. They usually intermarry with females of their own hereditary rank, belonging, therefore, to families free, like their own, from this special cause of sterility. Now a slight examination of the Almanac de Gotha gives us, for twenty-nine European sovereigns (nearly all those of the old reigning houses) ninetysix brothers and sisters (of whole blood), or nearly three apiece. In other words, four children is the average issue (as far as these figures show) of the marriage of a hereditary sovereign. But the number is a good deal larger if, as we suspect, the Almanac is not particular in recording the names of royal brothers and sisters who died infants. Putting the general result at five births to a marriage, we arrive at the fact that the number of births in sovereign houses is greater than the average in the most prolific country of Europe (4.8 in Belgium, according to Maurice Block). And as there are many circumstances connected with Court life which would naturally militate against the multiplication of children, we may pretty fairly infer that the cause of this phenomenon is the hereditary prolificness of the families which thus intermarry. But if incredulity like that of Mr. Buckle on the subject of hereditary qualities is very unphilosophical, it is necessary, nevertheless, to be on our guard against the opposite extreme. The predisposition of most writers is to the credulous side. They find instances of inheritance' everywhere. In the pursuit of their favourite theory they neglect the thousand causes of deviation which modify and interfere with the results of nearness of blood. There is no limit to the capacity of philosophers of this description for admitting extraordinary stories. No old nurse, who descants on the wonderful congenital signs and tokens, physical and mental, which she has noticed in the course of her business, is half so romantic on the subject as an anthropologist fairly mounted on his hobby. No wonder, therefore, if works of history and philosophy are full of the most absurd instances, based on no evidence at all or the most insignificant, of marvellous likenesses and transmitted specialties of temper and character; or that the most extravagant political theories are every day founded on certain supposed congenital qualities of people whose ancestors are asserted, on very shadowy evidence, to have been once upon a time Saxons or Celts, Latins or Sclaves, in countries where intermixture by marriage has prevailed for many centuries. We take up, almost at hazard, a specimen of this kind of popular triviality from a recent publication, in which we have found, nevertheless, some matter of interest and value on this as well as other cognate subjects. Dr. Elam, in A Physician's Problems,' cites as a proof of hereditary tallness the numerous gigantic figures, both of men and of women, met with in Potsdam, where for fifty years the guards of the late Frederick William of Prussia 'were quartered.' Not having ourselves remarked this tendency to lofty stature in the civil population of Potsdam so far as our observation has extended, and remembering that the late King Frederick William,' if by that name is meant the sovereign who delighted in gigantic guardsmen, has been dead a hundred and thirty years, we must be content to wait for farther elucidation. In the meantime we quote a still more |