$111,--Dr. Norman Maclean, in adducing evidence that "when families are
limited to two or three, racial impoverishment ensues," quotes among other eminent names those of John and Charles Wesley as the fifteenth and eighteenth child of their parents respectively. It is interesting to know that the remarkable mother of these distinguished sons—Susannah Wesley—was herself the twenty-fifth child of her father, Dr. Annesley, and the twenty-fourth of her father's second wife. As Mr. Arnold Lunn in his biography of John Wesley remarks, " Had Dr. Annesley been content with a modest family of two dozen, England would have been the poorer of one of the most remarkable women that the century pro- duced, and Methodism would have been robbed of its founder."
It would also be interesting to know in what order of succession in the family these and other of humanity's evil geniuses fell—Hitler (was he not an only child?), Goebbels, Robespierre, Mirabeau, Nero, Dr. Crippen, &c.—Yours faithfully, H. LOVERING PICKEN. The Manse, Lion Road, Torquay.
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