of course the first cousins of the maker of the genealogical study. It does the same for the mother's fraternity. Next it considers the fraternity to which the father's father belongs, considers their consorts and their children and grandchildren, and then takes up the study of the fraternity of the father's mother in the same way. The mother's parents next receive attention; and then the earlier generations are similarly treated, as far as the available records will allow. A pedigree study constructed on this plan really shows what traits are running through the families involved, and is vastly more significant than a mere chain of links, even though this might run through a dozen generations.
(5) With these changes, genealogy would become the study of heredity, rather than the study of lineage.
It is not meant to say that the study of heredity is nothing more than applied genealogy. As understood nowadays, it includes mathematical and biological territory which must always be foreign to genealogy. It might be said that in so far as man is concerned, heredity is the interpretation of genealogy, and eugenics the application of heredity. Genealogy should give its students a vision of the species as a great group of ever-changing, interrelated organisms, a great network originating in the obscurity of the past, stretching forward into the obscurity of the future, every individual in it organically related to every other, and all of them the heritors of the past in a very real sense.
Genealogists do well in giving a realization of the importance of the family, but they err if they base this teaching altogether on the family's pride in some remote ancestor who, even though he bore the family name and was a prodigy of virtues, probably counts for very little in the individual's make-up to-day.