> as lemmas

1608 Bp. T. Morton Preamble Incounter 93 Hee is in degree of kindred vnto the father of lies, in which line of descent I feare P. R. will appeare to be.

a1683 A. Sidney Disc. Govt. (1704) iii. xxx. 361 An uninterruptible Line of Descent.

1714 J. Asgill Succession House of Hannover Vindicated 44 Those who were first in the Line of Descent, have at length gain'd the Crown, notwithstanding all Parliamentary Provisions to the contrary.

1798 W. Coxe Mem. Sir R. Walpole I. ii. 8 When they found it necessary to break the hereditary line of descent, they made the deviation as small as possible..and re-established it in the same manner as it existed before that breach was made.

1869 C. Darwin Origin of Species (ed. 5) xiii. 515 Professor Häckel in his ‘Generelle Morphologie’..has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings.

1905 Springfield Weekly Republ. 5 May 2 He was by every line of descent an F.F.V.

1949 Q. Rev. Biol. 24 204/1 Probably the majority of recent students have regarded the human line of descent as having separated from the pongid or great-ape stock just before or at about the time that the latter split into its modern forms.

1988 H. L. Gates in H. A. Jacobs Incidents Life Slave Girl Foreword p. x That the progenitor of the black literary tradition was a woman means, in the most strictly literal sense, that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent.

2006 New Scientist 4 Mar. 16/4 Castorocauda lies outside the line of descent to all modern mammals, so it is a mammaliaform rather than a true mammal.