The story that Abraham Lincoln was an illegitimate son became a matter of gossip about the time of his first nomination for the presidency and was given a wide if stealthy circulation by the malice of the disaffected. He himself always spoke with reticence of his ancestry, for the reasons that he believed his mother to have been born out of wedlock and that, supposing his parents to have been married in Hardin County, Kentucky, he had looked in vain for the record of their marriage which was all the time lying in the court house of Washington County, where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been married 22 September, 1806. Lamon’s biography in 1872 first put the scandal into print, though in veiled language. Since then it has been repeated in varying forms, for the most part obscurely and always uncritically. While there has never been any good excuse for crediting it, there has come to be a better and better excuse for undertaking to refute it. That has now been done by William E. Barton in _The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln_, a convincing study which leaves not a square inch of ground for the scandal to stand on. Mr. Barton’s researches have been exhaustive and—barring a few minor slips—accurate; he follows the rules of evidence in a way to put to shame those many lawyers who on such trivial testimony have believed the story; at the risk of making his book too bulky he has included practically all the documents in the case; he writes everywhere with good temper, although he might well have been forgiven for being vexed at the inanity or insolence of most of those who have argued that Lincoln was the son of this or that Tom, Dick, or Harry.