A STUDY IN HEREDITY.* WE should be most reluctant to

say a word in disparagement of the inquiry into the moral and mental characteristics of the Royal houses of Europe to which this volume is devoted.

The author is seeking to estimate the influence, on the individual and on the family, of the special circumstances with which these privileged classes are surrounded from their birth. By taking great groups of interrelated human beings

whose pedigrees are ascertainable, and whose careers, in outline at least, have been authenticated, he strives to throw fresh light on the old enigma,—which is the more important, environment or heredity ? He has cast his net wide, and can boast that his book contains the names of three thousand two hundred and twelve distinct persons, and furnishes the diagnosis of over six hundred men and women. He unearths many curious facts in the science of eugenics which are unknown or ignored, together with many unsuspected relation- ships among the great figures of history. And he has worked out from a tangled and complex set of facts certain definite conclusions which can best be formulated in his own

language :—

" Quality possessed by entire ancestry is almost sure to appear. Quality possessed by one parent and half the ancestry is likely to appear with almost equal force in one out of every two descendants. Quality possessed by one parent only, and not present in the ancestry, has one chance in about four for its appearance in the progeny. Quality not possessed by either parent, but present in all the grandparents and most of the remaining ancestry would also have about one chance in two for its appearance in one of the children. If only one of the grand- parents possessed the quality in question, then the chances of its appearance in any one of the grandchildren of this ancestor would be only about one chance in sixteen."

Dr. Woods enunciates no law ; he merely states the probabilities according to his calculations, and he makes admissions which are in creditable contrast with certain Transatlantic railings against effete aristocracies. He insists most forcibly

"that there is no degeneration in modern royalty to be ascribed to their exceptional and exalted position per se, and that degeneration has only occurred in certain branches, and may always be explained either by pollution of the blood of the male line through marriage with a family in which degeneration was then existing, or by some constant artificial selection of the worst type rather than the best."

And in opposition to the popular notion, but in harmony with the researches of Mr. Alfred Ruth, he regards as untenable the theory that intermarriage is responsible for the decadence of certain Royal lines.

* Mental and Mora/ Heredity in Royalty : a Statistical Study in History and Psychology. By Frederick Adams Woods, M.D. With Genealogical Charts and 104 Portraits. London: George Bell and Sons. [12s. 6d. net.]

"It is not alone among degenerate families like Spain and Portugal that one finds wedlock among the near of kin. Such intermarriages are apparently equally common in families which have given la the highest mental and moral grades, namely Saxe- Coburg-Gotha, Hohenzollern, and Nassau-Dietz. The parents of Frederick the Great and his remarkable brothers and sisters were own cousins. The great Queen Isabella came from strongly inbred ancestry, and Ernest the Pious is many times in the pedigree of the excellent house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Further- more, we may state that the Romanoff degeneracy and Swedish eccentricities were neither caused nor perpetuated by the close marriage of kin."

But Dr. Woods cannot be said to have produced a very read- able book. The pageant of Regality is lost in mathematical formulae, in "grading by intellect," and in "grading by virtue!' The average of these qualities, expressed in decimals, bears small resemblance to the facts of history ; the attempt to find a common denominator for four shillings and four o'clock is doomed to failure. And, to be perfectly candid, we are forced to doubt whether the author is sufficiently equipped for that preliminary labelling of the specimens on which his calculations are based. He unrolls before us a huge diorama crowded with figures of men and women, who have to find their places in ten classes according to their virtues, and in ten other classes according to their intellect. A Ranke or a Stubbs would have quailed before the task ; but Dr. Woods is undismayed, buoyed up by the same touching faith in "the EncyclopEedias" which carried Mrs. Gallup through her con- troversial troubles. He is conscious of casting a heavy reproach upon the early annals of the house of Conde when be discovers that during several generations "not a single one, as Count of Vendome, Duke of Bourbon, or the possessor of any other high title, ever distinguished himself sufficiently to be even mentioned in Lippincott's Dictionary." The adjectives of undiscriminating or interested chroniclers are often the only credentials to a class in Dr. Woods's Tripos. And the pages which he has devoted to the Hanoverian dynasty in this country, and particularly his judgment on the children of George III., are proof that his historical reading has not carried him far below the surface.

Nor do we find any recognition of the effect upon the natural man of altered circumstances, of loftier ideals in morals and religion, of the softening of manners, of public opinion. The epithets " licentious " and " cruel " are those most commonly in use for the flagellation of delinquents in the past. Yet the evil instincts of mankind, call them original sin or what we will, have lost nothing of their potency ; only the modern conventions of society have erected a barrier to save the culprit from himself. The presence of a George IV. on the throne to-day would shake the Monarchy, but that Covereign contrasts very favourably in point of morals with Charles II.; and the Court of the Merry Monarch, as we know it from De Gramont, was Puritanical by the side of the dames galantes and capitalizes illustres of Brantome. To appear as co-respondent in the Divorce Court is the shipwreck of a political career in modern England, but a very different standard holds good across the Channel; and when George III. was King the Prime Minister of England could flaunt Nancy Parsons in his opera-box. So too with cruelty in its crude form, the lust for blood and torture. Even among their con- temporaries, John of England and Pedro of Castille were regarded as exceptional monsters, while Ezzelin enjoyed a bad pm-eminence in the age of the despots ; but acts of ruthless repression, whether in the shape of religious persecution, or the punishment of rebellious subjects, or the devastation of hostile territory, lie heavy on the fame of the Royal houses down to a comparatively recent date. Nous awns changg tout cela ; except now and again with a Romanoff or a degenerate Italian Bourbon, the reproach of "cruelty," as we apply the term to an Eastern despot, has disappeared from the charge-sheet of European Sovereigns. But are crowned heads and Royalties more blameless in this respect than their subjects ? Do not the essentials of cruelty—selfishness, and a cold-blooded dis- regard for the sufferings and unhappiness of others—still flourish regardless of rank and station ?

" These considerations, in addition to the extraordinary change that has come over the education and upbringing of Royal children, should make us pause before we accept too freely the generalisations on which Dr. Woods has reared his structure. But, without accepting all his conclusions, there is a great deal that is interesting and suggestive in the facts which he has so conscientiously accumulated. He rightly draws attention to the remarkable part which the descendants of William the Silent have played in modern history. The blood of the great Stadtholder runs in the veins of almost every Royal house in ,Europe, and by a strange irony of fate the young Queen of Spain can trace descent from the Prince who dealt the most fatal blow to the world-Empire of Philip II. ' Our own George I. was the great-great-grandson of William, and to-day King Edward VII. is actually nearer to him in degree than any other Royal personage in Europe. Frederick the Great was descended from him in no less than four distinct lines, and the present Kaiser is in the same position plus the additional

strain through his English mother. Those of William's

descendants who are sprung from his youngest son, Frederick Henry, have another immortal ancestor, the great Coligny, whose daughter Louise was espoused to "Le Taciturne " only a year before the death of the latter. In the words of Mr. Frederic Harrison, the house of Orange-Nassau was conspicuous "for its incessant intermarriages, its general fertility, and the predominance of female progeny." The male line became extinct with our William III., just a hundred and eighteen years after the murder of his great-grandfather, and to-day the Queen of Holland is an only daughter and childless.

The Hohenzollerns are no less conspicuous for their tenacity and their sustained characteristics. "Here we have," as Dr. Woods very truly remarks, "a line that for a thousand years has occupied an exclusive position, and yet we find it composed, to-day, of active, intelligent and moral persons." We are apt to rail at the destiny which for two centuries limited the field of our Royal marriages to the Protestant Princes and Princesses of Germany. Yet the German houses, however unattractive in many ways, comprised a wonderful admixture of the best ingredients of blood brought together more or less accidentally from the various countries of Northern and Central Europe. During the same period the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons were as steadily degenerating, Scandinavia was in chaos, and the Romanoffs were diluting the fiery strain of Peter the Great in a series of misalliances. The Act of Settlement and the Royal Marriage Act were the cause of much misery to sundry hapless individuals, and they tended to emphasise our national insularity, but they saved the Royal blood from the risk of pollution at half-a-dozen tainted streams.

Dr. Woods devotes some interesting pages, illustrated by a very curious series of portraits, to the facial peculiarities of the Hapsburgs, whose

"swollen, protruding lip was in the sixteenth century, in its original type, usually combined with a long heavy underjaw as one sees in the Emperor Charles V. Later the jaw became more nearly normal, though the lip still persisted, and can be traced, with its varying degrees of intensification, through no less than eighteen generations, coming out in at least seventy of the various descendants. In its latest manifestations it appears at the present day with diminished strength and modified form in the young King of Spain."

What is perhaps the most fascinating of all studies in Royal

heredity finds no place in this book ; we mean the house of Stuart. Apart from her wayward, gifted Scotch ancestry, Mary the Queen was a Tudor and a Guise. Charles I. derived much of his melancholy beauty from his Danish mother. Charles IL, grandson of Henri IV. of France, had a Medici for his maternal grandmother, and throughout his

chequered career showed himself a Gascon of the Gascons with more than a touch of Florentine guile. And though no

occupant of the English throne can claim descent from him, he has left his mark on the Peerage and on the roll of English Prime Ministers. In the course of a splendid panegyric, Burke reminded the House of Commons that the faults of Charles Fox were "faults which might exist in a descendant of Henry the Fourth of France, as they did exist in that father of his country." And "Junius," in a passage of diabolical ferocity, and also of great injustice, reminded the Duke of Grafton that "the character of the reputed ancestors of some men has made it possible for their descendants to be vicious in the extreme without being degenerate" :—

"Charles the First lived and died a hypocrite. Charles the Second was a hypocrite of another sort, and should have died upon the scaffold. At the distance of a century, we see their different characters happily revived, and blended in your Grace.

Sullen and severe without religion, profligate without gaiety, you live like Charles the Second, without being an amiable companion, and for aught I know, may die as his father did, without the reputation of a martyr."