the same roll;" and so on over the remainder of the 220 pages. If you
turn over a few of them you will find the same sort of thing: "Agnes,
the first daughter, was married to William de Vesey, of whom John de
Vesey, issueless, and William de Vesey, who had issue, John de Vesey,
who died before his father; and afterwards the said William de Vesey,
the father, without heir of his body;" and so on.

The reader whose fortune it has been to pass a portion of his early days
among venerable Scottish gentlewomen of the old school, will perhaps
experience an uneasy consciousness of having encountered matter of this
description before. It may recall to him misty recollections of
communications which followed a course something like this: "And so ye
see, auld Pittoddles, when his third wife deed, he got married upon the
laird o' Blaithershin's aughteenth daughter, that was sister to Jemima,
that was married intil Tam Flumexer, that was first and second cousin to
the Pittoddleses, whase brither became laird afterwards, and married
Blaithershin's Baubie--and that way Jemima became in a kind o' way her
ain niece and her ain aunty, an' as we used to say, her gude-brither was
married to his ain grannie."

But there is the deep and the shallow in genealogy, as in other arts and
sciences, and, incoherent as it may sound to the uninitiated, the
introduction to the Liber de Antiquis Legibus is no old woman's work,
but full of science and strange matter.[77] It all grows, however, in
genealogical trees, these being the predominant intellectual growth in
the editor's mind. In fact, your thorough genealogist is quite a
peculiar intellectual phenomenon. He is led on by a special and
irresistible internal influence or genius. If he should for some time
endeavour to strive after a more cosmopolite intellectual vitality, the
ruling spirit conquers all other pursuits. The organism of the tree
resumes its predominance, and if he have healthy sturdy brains, whatever
other matter they may have collected is betimes dragged into the growth,
and absorbed in the vitality of the majestic bole and huge branches.
There is perhaps no pursuit more thoroughly absorbing. The reason is
this: No man having yet made out for himself an articulate pedigree from
Adam--Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, to be sure, made
one for himself, but he had his tongue in his cheek all the while--no
clear pedigree going back to the first of men, every one, whethe