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Hereditary Genius
139
The table shows how exceedingly precarious must be the line of a
descent from an heiress, especially when younger sons are not apt to
marry. One-fifth of the heiresses have no male children at all; a full
third have not more than one child; three-fifths have not more than
two. It has been the salvation of many families that the husband
outlived the heiress whom he first married, and was able to leave
issue by a second wife.
Every advancement in dignity is a fresh inducement to the
introduction of another heiress into the family. Consequently, dukes
have a greater impregnation of heiress-blood than earls, and
dukedoms might be expected to be more frequently extinguished than
earldoms, and earldoms to be more apt to go than baronies.
Experience shows this to be most decidedly the case. Sir Bernard
Burke, in his preface to the “Extinct Peerages,” states that all the
English dukedoms created from the commencement of the order
down to the commencement of the reign of Charles II. are gone,
excepting three that are merged in royalty, and that only eleven
earldoms remain out of the many created by the Normans,
Plantagenets, and Tudors.
This concludes my statistics about the heiresses. I do not care to go
farther, because one ought to know something more about their
several histories before attempting to arrive at very precise results in
respect to their fertility. An heiress is not always the sole child of a
marriage contracted early in life and enduring for many years. She
may be the surviving child of a larger family, or the child of a late
marriage, or the parents may have early left her an orphan. We ought
also to consider the family of the husband, whether he be a sole child,
or one of a large family. These matters would afford a very
instructive field of inquiry to those who cared to labour in it, but it falls
outside my line of work. The reason I have gone so far is simply to
show that, although many men of eminent
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