But manifestly, this is an entirely artificial and improbable arrangement in the case of families. The eight grandparents _might_ be so removed in circumstances from surrounding families—so much superior to them, let us say—that neither they nor any of their descendants would intermarry with these inferior families: and thus none of their great-grandchildren would share descent from some other stock contemporary with the great-grandparents; or—which is the same thing, but seen in another light—none of the contemporaries of the great-grandchildren would share descent from the eight grandparents. But so complete a separation of the family from surrounding families would be altogether exceptional and unlikely. For, even assuming the eight families to be originally very markedly distinguished from all surrounding families, yet families rise and fall, marry unequally, and within the range of a few generations a wide disparity of blood and condition appears among the descendants of any group of families. So that, in point of fact, the relations assumed to subsist between man, the Simiadæ, and lower animal forms, corresponds to an unusual and improbable set of relations among families of several persons. Either, then, the relations of families must be regarded as not truly analogous to the relations of races, which no evolutionist would assert, or else we must adopt a somewhat different view of the relationship between man, the Simiadæ, and inferior animals. One other illustration may serve not only to make my argument clearer, but also, by presenting an actual case, to enforce the conclusion to which it points. We know that the various races of man are related together more or less closely, that some are purer than others, and that one or two claim almost absolute purity. Now, if we take one of these last, as, for instance, the Jewish race, and trace the race backwards to its origin, we find it, according to tradition, carried back to twelve families, the twelve sons of Jacob and their respective wives. (We cannot go further back because the wives of Jacob’s sons must be taken into account, and they were not descended from Abraham or Isaac and their wives only,—in fact, could not have been.) If the descendants of those twelve families had never intermarried with outside families in such sort that the descendants of such mixed families came to be regarded as true Hebrews, we should have in the Hebrews a race corresponding to the Simiadæ as regarded by Darwin, _i.e._, a race entirely descended from one set of families, and so constituting, in fact, a single family. But we know that, despite the objections entertained by the Hebrews against the intermixture of their race with other races, this did not happen. Not only did many of those regarded as true Hebrews share descent from nations outside their own, but many of those regarded as truly belonging to nations outside the Jewish race shared descent from the twelve sons of Jacob.