“The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long interbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and exclusive. No decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength; and the faces of today were struck as sharply from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from the portrait. But the intelligence was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required the potent, plebian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of the son.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “Olalla”, 1885.
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity 