Not many of us can trace our ancestry in the direct male line to the 8th century by authentic and written documents as did a Hebrew friend of mine, thus effectually meeting the doubts of a prospective brother-in-law who asked him as to his fitness to enter a family which was able to produce a stray peer of the realm in its roll. who has lost his parents in childhood may know nothing of them but that his father’s name was A. Mann, and that he was buried in a Kentish churchyard. He may go on a pilgrimage and find there recorded the fact that A. Mann was the son of A. Mann, Gent, who came from Northumberland. He will doubtless make another pilgrimage and find there a large vault ,
and over it an imposing record of many a Mann, and yet further he may go, and from the Heralds’ College find out the still earlier deriva-tion of his ancestors.
Detection of a Crime.
There are two chief ways of detecting a crime. By oral evidence from eye-witnesses or confession of the accused you may get direct proof, though even here are pitfalls from careless and hasty witnesses on the one hand, or on the other from a strange perversion of mind of the confessing person which is well enough known to forensic medicine. You may thus bring home to the accused his guilt by the method of the annalist. Or you may employ the more common method of studying circumstantial evidence; the story of the crime is read backwards and a verdict of guilty is given. This is the main stuff of which the prevalent detective story is composed .
A Parable.
A plain parable may well conclude this chapter.
As I mused on the chain of life I found a piece of whipcord which had been lying by for twenty-five years since some of it was used for rigging a model yacht, and this very efficient product of human art seemed to speak to me on the subject of my musings. Perhaps if Huxley could extract from a piece of chalk or lumps of coal two magnificent expositions on geology and biology, this little trifle of cord might afford a text on a way of looking at living things which should be useful in this old case of Lamarck v. Weismann—and others .
