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termarried in deference to mediæval prejudices and abhorred mesalliances, as they are called, or they have in certain cases allowed these marriages with persons of inferior social station to take place. The result of constant intermarriage is a speedy and inevitable decay of the noble families. This is owing to the fact that they originally sprang from persons not endowed with superior organic strength, as would be the case in a natural aristocracy, descended from better organized individuals, and hence, inbreeding must necessarily result in a rapid exhaustion of the vital capital. This vital capital may be as large as that of any common family, but it is exhausted sooner on account of the greater expenditure of it necessary in the more intensive life inevitable in the higher and more responsible position, without being able to borrow judiciously from time to time from the inexhaustible vital capital of the people. And when a member of the aristocracy does marry outside of his circle, and brings new blood into the family, let us see what kind of blood it is and what the causes are which led to his matrimonial choice. The cases are rare in which a man of rank takes a girl from the lower classes to be his wife on account of her physical and moral superiority. In order to bring about a genuine improvement in the blood of a family, the mother of the new branch should be some woman who possesses in addition to the normal physical organization which we recognize as harmonious beauty, a soundness and equipoise of temperament, qualities which reveal themselves in a calm, or even narrow-minded, morality. Usually a mesalliance is caused by the attractions of wealth or else by some caprice of passion. Let us analyze the conditions under which these two kinds of mesalliances are usually contracted. A man of ancient lineage marries some wealthy plebeian in order to replate his coat of arms, as the saying is. In that case he