442 



NATURE 



[February 2, 191 1 



outside the purview of hereditary investigation. 

 Galton's reply was very simple : Much of what his 

 critic had said "might have been appropriately urged 

 forty years ago, before accurate measurement of the 

 statistical effects of heredity had been commenced, 

 but it was quite obsolete now." 



That is the extreme limit to which Galton's Quaker 

 temperament ever, in the presence of the present 

 writer, allowed him to reply, and here it was a ques- 

 tion of checking a vague assertion which swept away 

 the best part of a man's life work unexamined. That 

 this calmness of mental attitude was very largely innate 

 and not due to environment, is well brought out by a 

 quaint little biography of the first eight years of his 

 life, written by his mother (Violetta Galton — half- 

 sister of Charles Darwin's father) when he went to 

 a boarding-school in 1830.^ His after-tastes and tem- 

 perament, his great good nature, his calm temper, his 

 resourcefulness and courage,- are sufficiently indicated 

 by a mother who was closely observant, but who could 

 have no knowledge of the future distinction of her 

 youngest child. A further fundamental factor of 

 Galton's mental outfit was his extraordinary mechani- 

 cal ingenuity. This may also have been a Darwin 

 heritage, for it has been shown by other members of 

 the stock. At the same time his paternal grandfather, 

 Samuel John Galton, was not only a statistician, but a 

 man of mechanical tastes and a friend of Boulton and 

 Watt, and the same form of ability was markedly 

 evidenced in another grandson, Sir Douglas Galton. 



Francis Galton had the mechanical ingenuity^ which 

 makes a great engineer or experimentalist; his sug- 

 gestions were always of the simplest kind, and he 

 used the simplest constructions and the simplest 

 materials. Most of his friends will remember his 

 delight in some almost primitive solution of a 

 mechanical difficulty, that possibly they had themselves 

 pondered over and brought to him in despair. Nothing 

 worries the secretary of a scientific society or the 

 editor of a journal more than the vagaries of an author 

 who provides diagrams wholly unsuited to the page- 

 size of their publications ; Galton would be ready with a 

 photographic method of modifying the linear scales in 

 ■difTerent ratios in two directions. Nothing is more 

 trying at lecture or theatre than the tall person or hat ; 

 Galton had his "hyperscope "—a simple tube with two 

 reflecting mirrors at 45° by which he saw over or 

 round them, and he would use it in a crowd when he 

 wished to see what was going on beyond it. Or he 

 would carry a wooden brick in a parcel with a long 

 string attached to it ; slowly lowering it in a crowd, 

 he would stand on his block of vantage, and raise it 

 again by its string afterwards without attracting 

 observation. Elsewhere it has been said that, if one 

 wanted to put a saddle on a camel's back without 

 chafing it, to manage . the women of a treacherous 

 African tribe, to measure a snail's shell, or to work 

 a theodolite in the midst of London traffic, Galton 

 w^ould tell you how it might be done. 



Beyond mechanical ingenuity ' he had great wealth 

 of illustration ; what he could possibly represent to the 

 eye, he would do, for he had a firm belief that graphic 

 representation is more impressive than mere nurnbers. 

 Within a fortnight almost of his death, seated out- 

 doors in a shelter, he was discussing with the present 



1 Would it be safe to suggest that Galton inherited froni his Danvin 

 mother his views on family history ? Is " T he Life History Album (Mac- 

 millan, 1884 and ,90^) with its spaces for observations and photographs of 

 the child, a lineal descendant of this biography with silhouette illustration i 



2 This was of much value to him in his later travels. When hve years 

 old his mother took him into a field where the ser^-ants were trying to 

 catch some geese. Francis ionmediately ran among them and seizing the 

 old gander by the neck brought him to his mother muttering at the same 

 time to himself the lines from " Chevy Chase ": 



" Thou art the most courageous knight, 



That ever 1 did see " 



S Many of the contrivances devised for his first Anthropometric Laboratory 

 are still in current use. 



NO. 2153, VOL. 85] 



writer as eagerly and keenly as he would have done 

 twenty years ago, the best method of graphically 

 representing and comparing typical racial crania. 



Through the last )'ears of life, apart from his 

 eugenic work, he was very busy in trying to deduce 

 quantitative measures of general likeness ; evidences 

 of this were given in his letters on portraiture to this 

 Journal, and in his attempts to make a graduated 

 scale of "blurrers," which like a photometric wedge 

 would equalise divergence until differentiation of the 

 two compared portraits became impossible. Photo- 

 graphs of members of the same family — "similar and 

 similarly situated," as the mathematicians have it — 

 "blurred" more readily than those of strangers in 

 blood. These things amount, not to complete fulfil- 

 ments, but to suggestions and inspirations. But 

 Francis Galton realised among the earliest that a 

 comparison of the individual organs and characters of 

 local races needs supplementing by a comparison in 

 some manner of two " index " numbers, which by their 

 deviation shall measure the similarity or diversity of 

 these races, each as a unit complex of many indi- 

 vidual characters. 



Judged from the modern specialist standard, Galton 

 was, perhaps, not a "mathematician," but he had 

 enough mathematics for most of the purposes 

 of scientific observation, .and he knew how to 

 enlist mathematical aid w'hen he required it. 

 Few of those who have really studied his 

 work or come in contact with his singularly clear 

 and logical mind, would have wished his education 

 other than it was. The training in observation 

 provided by hospital clerking under a good clinical 

 teacher, could never have been replaced with profit 

 by years spent over symbolic analysis ; the man who 

 w'ould patiently watch the workman in a foreign 

 country plying his chisel or trowel in order to learn 

 differentiation of method in craftsmanship, and then 

 take a lesson himself in handling the tool in the 

 native way, was a born observer, whose talents lay in 

 other fields than the higher abstract analytic. Yet the 

 essential feature of his work was, and his reputation 

 with the future will largely depend on, his extension 

 of analytical methods to the descriptive sciences. 

 Without' Gauss the work of Quetelet would have been 

 impossible. Without Quetelet we should perhaps have] 

 missed Francis Galton, and from Galton and his 

 school the new methods have spread, and are spread-J 

 ing into the most varied branches of science ; in medi- 

 cine both treatment and diagnosis will be influenced 

 by them, in physiology and psychology their advan-J 

 tages are being admitted, in biology, anthropology,^ 

 sociology and its latest offspring— eugenics— their im- 

 portance has been fully recognised. And wherein does 

 the validity of this new treatment consist? It lies 

 very simply in this, that Galton following Quetelet 

 recognised that causation expressible in terms at 

 mathematical function was not the only, or even the 

 chief category, under which men of science can work; 

 that exact methods were applicable to that looser relaj 

 tion or association, which now passes by the name of 

 correlation. To Galton is due the honour of having ^ 

 reached the first simple measure of this relationship, 

 and in the earlier writings of his keen disciple Weldon, 

 we find it called "Galton's Function," a name whicr 

 had to be dropped as the conception becarne more 

 general and its types differentiated and classified. It 

 ceased to be possible to call after its discoverer 

 philosophical category wider than that of causation^' 

 and embracing causation as a subclass. 



The historv— at least, the formal history— of "is dis- 

 covery is very suggestive of the man and his method. 

 He had been studying the size of organs in parents 

 and their offspring, and he formed what is now termed 

 a correlation table ; that numerical table he sought to 



