FRANCIS GALTON 



A GREAT personality has passed from us in the death of Francis 

 Galton. To few has it been given to live so full and so valuable 

 a life. The Goddess Fortune, it is true, offered him opportunity 

 with a generous hand ; rarely however has an offer been more 

 amply justified than that she made to Francis Galton, for the 

 treasure has been invested by its trustee in safe things, which 

 will never cease to pay. Galton never flew too high nor 

 attempted to probe too deep ; he was conscious both of the 

 extent and of the limitation of his powers ; his work is of lasting 

 value to mankind because he possessed in a high degree that 

 sense which tells its owner which tasks lie within and which 

 beyond his power. 



But we should be disloyal to Galton if we regarded him as 

 an isolated personality detached from his natural setting — his 

 ancestry. Indeed we are not truly loyal to what he believed 

 unless we regard the individual as a product (in the strictly 

 literal sense of a continuation without cessation of individuality) 

 of his ancestors and intelligible only in the light of a knowledge 

 of those ancestors. Turgenev and Samuel Butler owe their 

 supreme position as novelists to the fact that they perceived this. 



Perhaps the most remarkable instance of a monopoly 

 possessed by a single family over a particular business is the 

 limitation to the Darwin family of the business of bringing home 

 the truth of evolution to the understanding of mankind. We 

 make no apology for the term business. It is no longer 

 necessary to point out that Charles Darwin's achievement was 

 not to discover evolution but the much heavier task of forcing 

 mankind to believe in it. To satisfy oneself of the truth of 

 evolution is the work of a philosopher; to convince other people 

 of this truth is a labour of Hercules. 



Erasmus Darwin married twice. By his first wife he was 

 grandfather to Charles Darwin, by his second to Francis Galton. 

 " His hereditary influence," says Galton {Memories of My Life, 

 p. 7), " seems to have been very strong. His son Charles, who 



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