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We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what may be called the Academic Races.  Their names have been on college catalogues for generation after generation.  They have filled the learned professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to our own time.  If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a descendant of one of the Academic Races.  Other things being equal, he will take more naturally, more easily, to his books.  His features will be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents.  The gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation.

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