r short
or long, Celtic or Saxon, comes into the clouds at last. It is when a
pedigree approaches extinction that the occasion opens for the
genealogist to exercise his subtlety and skill, and his exertions become
all the more zealous and exciting that he knows he must be baffled
somewhere. The pursuit is described as possessing something like the
same absorbing influence which is exercised over certain minds by the
higher mathematics. The devotees get to think that all human knowledge
centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and
exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard
talking with compassionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as
not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant
by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.

[Footnote 77: I remember hearing of an instance at a jury trial in
Scotland, where counsel had an extremely subtle point of genealogy to
make out, and no one but a ploughman witness, totally destitute of the
genealogical faculty, to assist him to it. His plan--and probably a very
judicious one in the general case--was to get the witness on a
table-land of broad unmistakable principle, and then by degrees lure him
farther on. Thus he got the witness readily to admit that his own mother
was older than himself, but no exertion of ingenuity could get his
intellect a step beyond that broad admission.]

These are generally great readers--reading is absolutely necessary for
their pursuit; but they have a faculty of going over literary ground,
picking up the proper names, and carrying them away, unconscious of
anything else, as pointers go over stubble fields and raise the
partridges, without taking any heed of the valuable examples of
cryptogamic botany or palaeozoic entomology they may have trodden over. A
certain writer on logic and metaphysics was once as much astonished as
gratified by an eminent genealogical antiquary's expression of interest
in a discovery which his last book contained. The philosopher thought
his views on the subjectivity of the nominalists and the objectivity of
the realists had at last been appreciated; but the discovery was merely
this, that the name of a person who, according to the previously
imperfect science of the genealogist, ought not to have existed then and
there, was referred to in a letter from Spinoza, cited in defence of
certain views upon the absolute.

The votaries of this pursuit beco