Note 904 — BOOK IV. THE CRITICS.

The puzzling effect of counting up one’s great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers up to the twentieth degree or so is described by Blackstone as quoted by Godwin (Popn.) and re-quoted by Hazlitt (Spirit of the Age, 1825, p. 273, ‘Godwin’). The puzzle is less if we remember that our remote ancestors must have married into each other’s families, or rather were scions in the end of the same families. We cannot go back to a single pair except through the “prohibited degrees.”