FRANCIS G ALTON J 75 



led him through Syria, and back to England where hunting and shoot- 

 ing, extensive reading and digesting what he read by much thinking 

 about it, completed what we have for convenience differentiated off as 

 the period of training. 



The only published paper of this period was a pamphlet, entitled 

 " Telotype, a Printing Electric Telegraph." The following sixty odd 

 years of his life were to be devoted to productive work in the most 

 varied branches of science. 



Exploration and Geographical Science 



In an atlas of to-day the white areas on the map are very small in 

 comparison with those which are meshed with the highways. The edi- 

 tions in 1849 were very different. " It was a time when the ideas of 

 persons interested in geography were in a justifiable state of ferment." 



The journey up the Nile and into the Soudan had been " a tour 

 hastily performed, but sufficient to imbue or poison me with the fas- 

 cination for further enterprise, which African tourists have so espe- 

 cially felt — a fascination which has often enough proved its power by 

 urging the same traveler to risk his comfort, his health and his life, 

 over and over again, and to cling with pertinacity to a country which 

 after all seems to afford little else but hazard and hardships, ivory 

 and fever." 



It was not merely the enticement of big game, of which wonderful 

 stories had begun to come back to England, that attracted Mr. Galton 

 to South Africa. Every chapter of his book, " The Narrative of an 

 Explorer in Tropical South Africa," bespeaks keenness of observation 

 and solicitude for scientific precision. It can not be abstracted here, 

 neither can space be spared for quotations to show its literary charm. 

 The difficulties of the journey are summarized — and very modestly — 

 in the last chapter. 



Christmas and New Year 's day had passed, when early in January, 1852, as 

 the morning haze cleared away, the sails of a schooner loomed large before us; 

 in a moment I was in my pontoon and paddled out to her, jumped on board, 

 and received my letters of a year and nine months' interval. They were not 

 indeed unchequered by melancholy news; but for the intelligence they conveyed 

 of my own family circle I had every reason to be grateful. Thus closed my 

 anxieties and doubts. I had much indeed to be thankful for. I had not lost one 

 of my many men either through violence or through sickness in the long and 

 harassing journey I had made. It was undertaken with servants, who, at start- 

 ing, were anything but qualified for their work, who grumbled, held back and 

 even mutinied, and over whom I had none other than a moral control. I had to 

 break in the very cattle that were to carry me, and to drill into my service a 

 worthless set of natives, speaking an unknown tongue. The country was suffer- 

 ing from all the atrocities of savage war when I arrived, and this state of things 

 I had to put an end to before I could proceed. All this being accomplished, I 

 found myself without any food to depend upon, except the oxen that I drove 

 with me, which might, on any evening, decamp or be swept off in a night attack 



