Every man has two parents, four grand-parents, eight great-grand-parents, sixteen great-great-grand-parents, &c., &c., &c. If we reckon 30 years to a generation, and carry on the above series to the time of the Norman conquest, it will be found that each one of us must have had at that period, no less than 32,000,000 of ancestors. Now, making all allowance for the crossing of genealogical lines, and consequently for the same person being in many of the intersections, still there will remain a number sufficient, at that period, to cover the whole Norman and Anglo-Saxon race. Whatever, therefore, was then noble, or pious, or princely, or even kingly, stands somewhere in the line of ancestry of the most ignoble and plebeian among us. Each man of the present day may be almost certain of having had, not only earls (and it may be bishops), but even crowned heads among his progenitors. And so also may we be almost assured that the highest families of that period have now lineal representatives in persons so low in the social scale, that all the sounding lines of heraldry would fail to fathom the depth of their obscurity. In less than a thousand years, the blood of Victoria inevitably mingles with that of some of the most ignoble of the earth. Carry the calculation further back, and we soon pass beyond any population that ever existed on our globe. A thousand years from the present time brings the number up to 1,024,000,000. Two or three centuries more carries it beyond a thousand billions, and long before we arrive at the period of our world's creation, it would have reached a number surpassing all powers of easy enumeration. It is a consequence, too, of the same view, that a thousand years hence, each man who has now an ordinary family of children, will probably have a representative some way of his blood in each one of 30,000,000 of persons; and that these will be of all conditions, high and low, rich and poor, unless, as may be the case, some system of social philosophy may long before that have swept all distinctions from our world. Editor's Drawer. The "monitory season" of Nature has come. The faded garniture of the fields; the many-colored, gorgeous woods; the fitful winds, sighing for the flowers "whose fragrance late they bore:" the peculiar yellow-green of the sky at the horizon, in the twilight gloaming; all these proclaim that "summer is ended" and autumn is here. Brainard, a poet of true tenderness and feeling, once asked, "What is there saddening in the autumn leaf?" Perhaps it would be difficult to tell _what_ it is, but that it _is_ saddening, in the midst of its dying beauty, most persons have felt. One of our own poets, too early called away,[10] wrote many years since, on the first day of October, the following sad and tender lines: