Is this the way to obtain fair averages? We might as well
require that all the noble marriages which during the last fifty years
have produced ten children apiece should be added to those of the peers
living in 1828. The proper way to ascertain whether a set of people be
prolific or sterile is, not to take marriages selected from the
mass either on account of their fruitfulness or on account of their
sterility, but to take a collection of marriages which there is no
reason to think either more or less fruitful than others. What reason is
there to think that the marriages contracted by the peers who were alive
in 1828 were more fruitful than those contracted by the peers who were
alive in 1800 or in 1750?

We will add another passage from Mr Sadler's pamphlet on this subject.
We attributed the extinction of peerages partly to the fact that those
honours are for the most part limited to heirs male.

"This is a discovery indeed! Peeresses 'eminently prolific,' do not,
as Macbeth conjured his spouse, 'bring forth men-children only;' they
actually produce daughters as well as sons!! Why, does not the Reviewer
see, that so long as the rule of nature, which proportions the sexes so
accurately to each other, continues to exist, a tendency to a diminution
in one sex proves, as certainly as the demonstration of any mathematical
problem, a tendency to a diminution in both; but to talk of 'eminently
prolific' peeresses, and still maintain that the rapid extinction in
peerages is owing to their not bearing male children exclusively, is
arrant nonsense."

Now, if there be any proposition on the face of the earth which we
should not have expected to hear characterised as arrant nonsense, it
is this,--that an honour limited to males alone is more likely to
become extinct than an honour which, like the crown of England, descends
indifferently to sons and daughters. We have heard, nay, we actually
know families, in which, much as Mr Sadler may marvel at it, there are
daughters and no sons. Nay, we know many such families. We are as much
inclined as Mr Sadler to trace the benevolent and wise arrangements of
Providence in the physical world, when once we are satisfied as to
the facts on which we proceed. And we have always considered it as
an arrangement deserving of the highest admiration, that, though in
families the number of males and females differs widely, yet in great
collections of human beings the disparity almost disappears. T