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.
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