CHAPTER XIII

To take a concrete though wholly imaginary illustration: what man would not feel a certain satisfaction in being a lineal descendant of George Washington? And yet, if the Father of his Country be placed at only four removes from the living individual, nothing is more certain than that this hypothetical living individual had fifteen other ancestors in George Washington's generation, any one of whom may play as great or a greater part in his ancestry; and so remote are they all that, as a statistical average, it is calculated that the contribution of George Washington to the ancestry of the hypothetical living individual would be perhaps not more than one-third of 1% of the total. The small influence of one of these remote ancestors may be seen at a glance, if a chart of all the ancestors up to the generation of the great hero is made. Following out the illustration, a pedigree based on George Washington would look like the diagram in Fig. 41. In more remote generations, the probable biological influence of the ancestor becomes practically nil. Thus Americans who trace their descent to some royal personage of England or the Continent, a dozen generations ago, may get a certain amount of spiritual satisfaction out of the relationship, but they certainly can derive little real help, of a hereditary kind, from this ancestor. And when one goes farther back,—as to William the Conqueror, who seems to rank with the Mayflower immigrants as a progenitor of many descendants—the claim of descent becomes really a joke. If 24 generations have elapsed between the present and the time of William the Conqueror, every individual living to-day must have had living in the epoch of the Norman conquest not less than sixteen million ancestors. Of course, there was no such number of people in all