These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  It was remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.

A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the “survival of the fittest,”—­in the estimate of the descendants.  It is inclined to remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living heirs of the family name and traditions.  As every man may count two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection.  If he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of personages to choose from.  The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by intermarriage of relatives.  One of these, from whom the name descended, was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.

His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.

Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson’s sixty-four grandfathers at the seventh remove.  We know the tenacity of certain family characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary.  Inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess.  Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn’s move carries him from one square to the next.  Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white bishop sweeps the board on his own color.  Sometimes the distinguishing characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle strides over the black and white squares.  Sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight’s move were repeated on the squares of human individuality.  It is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of New England.

The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or second hand, the Magnolia Christi Americana, of the Reverend Cotton Mather.  The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies from the London-printed, folio of 1702.