the
past.

But now let us turn in the other direction, the direction of the future,
because there it is that this series of considerations becomes most
edifying. It is the commonest trick to think of a man's descendants
as though they were his own. We are told that one of the dearest human
motives is the desire to found a family, but think how much of a family
one founds at the best. One's son is after all only half one's blood,
one grandson only a quarter, and so one goes on until it may be that in
ten brief generations one's heir and namesake has but 1/1024th of one's
inherited self. Those other thousand odd unpredictable people thrust
in and mingle with one's pride. The trend of all things nowadays--the
ever-increasing ease of communication, the great and increasing drift of
population, the establishment of a common standard of civilization--is
to render such admixture far more probable and facile in the future than
in the past.

It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious hoarder of wealth,
some egotistical founder of name and family, returning to find
his descendants--HIS descendants--after the lapse of a few brief
generations. His heir and namesake may have not a thousandth part of
his heredity, while under some other name, lost to all the tradition and
glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through much intermarriage, may
be a multitude of people who have as much as a fiftieth or even more of
his quality. They may even be in servitude and dependence to the really
alien person who is head of the family. Our founder will go through the
spreading record of offspring and find it mixed with that of people he
most hated and despised. The antagonists he wronged and overcame will
have crept into his line and recaptured all they lost; have played the
cuckoo in his blood and acquisitions, and turned out his diluted strain
to perish.

And while I am being thus biological let me point out another queer
aspect in which our egotism is overridden by physical facts. Men and
women are apt to think of their children as being their very own,
blood of their blood and bone of their bone. But indeed one of the
most striking facts in this matter is the frequent want of resemblance
between parents and children. It is one of the commonest things in the
world for a child to resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a trait
of some grandparent that has seemed entirely lost in the intervening
generation. The Mendelians have given