66 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



aims of the Society, derived from exceptional personal or 

 official advantages of position " ; (5) that the number 

 annually elected should be limited to that determined by 

 the average of the last eight or ten years say, not more 

 than three. The effect of these changes would be to bring 

 the election of the above-named personages more nearly 

 under the rules governing the election of ordinary Fellows 

 and remove all appearance of privilege. 



At the Anniversary Meeting on April 28th, Sir W. Grove 

 referred to General Strachey's suggestions, and said that 

 the subject of election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society 

 had been very fully discussed prior to the changes made some 

 years ago, when it had been decided not to make any alter- 

 ation in the rules governing the election of privileged persons. 



The vacancies, caused by the deaths of Dr. Bence Jones, 

 Mr. Partridge, and Mr. Archibald Smith, were filled by the 

 elections of Mr. Francis Galton, Dr. Giinther, and Professor 

 Henry Smith. 



SIR FRANCIS GALTON, son of a banker, who had married a daughter 

 of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was 

 born in Birmingham on Feb. i6th, 1822, and went to Trinity College, 

 Cambridge. Here weak health prevented severe study, but he 

 was preparing to enter the medical profession when the death of 

 his father in 1844 enabled him to devote himself to scientific pursuits. 

 After travelling in Syria and to Khartum on the Nile, then a more 

 difficult journey than it has since become, he landed at Walfish 

 Bay in 1850, and explored parts of Damara Land, hitherto unknown, 

 encountering serious hardships and dangers. These permanently 

 affected his health, but they produced two books, Tropical South 

 Africa (in 1853) and The Art of Travel (in 1855), each of them 

 deservedly popular. In meteorology he did valuable work on 

 anticyclones, and before 1865 began his studies on the laws of 

 heredity, in which he showed that quantitative as well as qualitative 

 measures are applicable to many personal attributes, a by-product 

 of which was his discovery of the permanence of finger-prints, which 

 has become of the highest value for the identification of individuals. 

 He was a strong advocate of eugenics, and wrote many important 

 contributions to this and other branches of science, not the least 

 interesting being the Memories of My Life. Elected F.R.S. in 

 1856, he received a Royal Medal in 1876, the Darwin in 1902, and 

 the Copley in 1910. Oxford made him an Hon. D.C.L. in 1894 and 

 Cambridge an Hon. Sc.D. in the following year. In 1909 he was 



