The American Colonies and the West Indies, particularly the former, figure as the favourite dumping-ground of the seventeenth-century younger son with the historian, when skimming briefly over these social trifles. The Americans themselves too, with a natural and venial yearning for decorative ancestors, work the younger-son tradition for all it is worth, and paint him when they get him as a much more important person than he really was. The New Englanders may be excepted, for they are a precise people and have worked out their genealogies carefully to the original Pilgrim father (using that term in a general sense) with more regard for him as a sturdy pioneer than as a possible armiger. He was generally, in fact, of respectable middle-class family. The theocratic atmosphere of New England was not calculated to attract the offspring of squires or the like. The southern colonies are, of course, their traditional goal. Captain John Smith, virtual founder of Virginia, took out seventy such with _gent_ marked against each of their ill-fated names on his invaluable chronicle. They died to a man, poor fellows, and the only gleam in their brief and melancholy story is when the indomitable captain led out batches of them to fell trees and they swore so roundly at their blistering hands that a bucket of water down the neck was decreed for every oath, after which ‘all was merriment and good humour.’ The next ‘Supply,’ including more of them, also died off. But a great many younger sons undoubtedly went to Virginia when the colony settled down to prosperity, and a great many of other sorts too. After the Civil Wars, ex-Royalists of all ranks and grades flocked there, most of the more important to return, naturally, at the Restoration. In conning the lists of these early settlers and then taking stock of those who ultimately came out on top as men of property and in a sense founders of families, it is interesting to speculate from their names, difficult enough with English ones, what various sources they came from. In the hard struggle of early colonial life the common men had probably rather the best of the younger son. An early governor of Virginia writes home with a touch of irritation, ‘Everybody here wants to be a gentleman,’ and the colony was assuredly run till the Revolutionary war in the interests of those who either were so by birth or became so through prosperity. With a few notable exceptions, most of the older and leading colonial families bear names of undistinguished sound to an English ear.