2 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



growths. In youth friends are as primitive tribes, they raid each 

 other's preserves both to destroy and to capture what they do not 

 themselves possess ; they mould each other's mental growth by friction 

 and combat, rather than by peaceful interchange of commodities ; the 

 barrier of age to age, or of age to youth is wanting, and we actually 

 know our friends in the very making of their characters. The friend- 

 ships of age and age, and of youth and age possess many factors which 

 fail the friendship of youth and youth ; there is probably no wiser gift 

 a parent can wish for a child than the rare friendship of youth and age, 

 and this even if it verges on hero-worship. But neither such friend- 

 ship, nor that of age with age, is the one which best fits the biographer 

 for his task of measuring the circumstances which have influenced 

 a life, or of portraying the mental evolution of what he has only known 

 in its ripest form. Francis Galton was seventy years of age before the 

 present writer knew him personally, although the written influence 

 began five years earlier ; he was seventy-five at least before intimacy 

 ripened into a friendship which grew in closeness with the years. 

 This, and the age difference of between thirty and forty years, might 

 disqualify, and indeed do disqualify the writer for any attempt at what 

 he understands by genuine biography from a portrayal such as Arnold 

 gives us of Clough, or Hogg of Shelley the intense reality which 

 springs from a personal and intimate knowledge of youthful develop- 

 ment. But to be drawn in this sense we must die young, before at 

 least our contemporaries have lost the will and power to wield the pen ; 

 and there are but few who achieve and die young in the field of science. 

 Francis Galton, and therein the Fates were kindly, was not one of 

 these. He was over fifty years of age before much of his best work 

 was done ; he was sixty-seven when his Natural Inheritance was 

 published, the book which may be said to have created his school. 

 For although his methods were developed in papers of the preceding 

 decade, that book undoubtedly first made them known to us, and 

 found him the lieutenants who built up the school of modern statistics. 

 Other work of the highest value and of permanent usefulness in many 

 branches of science Galton achieved before he was fifty, but the first 

 central fact of his life is the relative lateness of much of his most 

 inspiring work. His greatest contribution to method was published 

 after he was sixty ; his greatest appreciation of what that method 

 might achieve for man was hardly pressed on public attention before 



