FRANCIS G ALTON 179 



or which may probably be made of composite photography would lead 

 us too far afield. 



Biology and Biometry, Human Faculty and Heredity 



When Charles Darwin's name was proposed before the French 

 Academy for membership in the zoological section one of the immortals 

 strongly opposed, and offered to put a hundred others before him be- 

 cause of their contributions of demonstrable facts. 



Now whether Darwin is to be ranked as a zoologist or Galton as a 

 biologist is one of those irrelevant questions the answer to which de- 

 pends entirely upon definition. If biologist means only a worker in a 

 historically fenced in field, then Mr. Galton has little claim to be known 

 as a biologist. If, however, the term biology belongs to a living instead 

 of a dead language and is capable of changing its meaning as men un- 

 trammeled by traditional barriers suggest new methods which broaden 

 and deepen, if a man is to be judged by the directing influence he 

 exerts as well as by the pages he publishes, then Francis Galton must 

 take rank as a very great biologist indeed. 



His South African narrative contains practically no observations 

 on natural history of the kind generally found in works of exploration. 

 Possibly this side of the work was left entirely to his companion, 

 Charles J. Andersson, who was particularly interested in natural his- 

 tory, and afterwards continued observations and wrote on the region 

 which they had opened up, for there are in Mr. Galton's book many 

 keen observations on the behavior of his cattle. This interest in and 

 capacity for detailed study of the behavior of animals is also evident 

 in the " Art of Travel." A paper on " Gregariousness in Cattle and in 

 Men " was published in 1872. 



The only piece of work along at all conventional lines was his mem- 

 oir on " Patterns in Thumb and Finger Marks," published by the 

 Boyal Society. 



Experimental methods in biology attracted him. He wrote on ex- 

 perimental moth breeding as a means of verifying certain important 

 constants in the general theory of heredity, and performed experiments 

 to test the theory of pangenesis by breeding from rabbits of a pure 

 variety into whose circulation blood from other varieties had been 

 largely transfused. Thus forty years ago he undertook problems 

 analogous to those which are now being attacked by quite a different 

 method — namely by the transplantation of ovaries. Experimental 

 studies in the inheritance of size of seed in sweet peas formed a part of 

 the basis of his well-known law of regression. 



If, as will be shown later, Francis Galton's great contribution to 

 botany and zoology was that of method, the case is very different in 

 that branch of biology which pertains to man. 



The volume on South Africa attests a live interest in racial traits 



