ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 609 



The first who seems to have fully grasped the Dar- 

 winian problem from this point of view is Mr Francis 

 Galton, 1 who in a series of papers, and notably in his ST. 



Galton. 



well-known works on 'Hereditary Genius ' (186 9) and 

 on 'Inheritance' (1889), made a beginning in the statis- 

 tical treatment of the phenomena of Variation. The 

 novel point of view which was thus introduced into 

 natural science was perhaps somewhat obscured by its 

 immediate application to a most difficult and unique 

 problem, which can hardly be discussed without im- 

 porting what may be called a sentimental bias. This 

 was the question of the connection through descent 

 of those rare occurrences in human nature which we 

 term genius. Mental phenomena had been almost 

 entirely passed over 2 by Darwin. The results which 

 Mr Galton arrives at, so far as the phenomena of genius 

 are concerned, are of minor importance compared with 

 the general methods which he introduced or suggested 

 for dealing with statistics of heredity. In these he 

 combined the ideas of Quetelet with that remarkable 



1 Mr Francis Galton (born 1822, 

 a grandson of Erasmus Darwin) 

 had, like his celebrated cousin, 

 begun his career as a medical 

 student, and then become a well- 

 known traveller and explorer. 

 Subsequently he devoted himself 

 to meteorology, where he drew 

 attention to the existence and 

 theory of an ti- cyclones. His first 

 publication, referring not to physi- 

 cal but to human statistics, ap- 

 peared in ' Macmillan's Magazine ' 

 in 1865, in the shape of two 

 articles on " Hereditary Talent 



genius," which was "usually 

 scouted." He rightly claims "to 

 be the first to treat the subject in 

 a statistical manner, to arrive at 

 numerical results, and to introduce 

 the 'law of deviation from an 

 average ' into discussions on 

 heredity " (Preface to ' Hereditary 

 Genius,' published one year after 

 Darwin's great work in which was 

 put forward the hypothesis of 

 Pangenesis). 



2 As stated by Darwin himself. 

 See 'Animals and Plants under 

 Domestication' (1868), vol. ii. p. 



and Character." Here he intro- 353. 

 duced the " theory of hereditary 



VOL. II. 2 Q 



