PREFACE 



THE delay that has attended the issue of this Life of Francis 

 Galton, of which even now only the first volume appears, is largely 

 due to three causes. In the first place the writer has so many other 

 duties that the time to sort out, peruse and abstract the large amount 

 of available material has only been obtained in odd holiday intervals 

 or by postponing the claims of students and workers in the Galton 

 Laboratory on his attention and energy. I trust that they will for the 

 sake of this account of the life of the man, to whom we alike owe so 

 much, pardon the delays, which have so often been inflicted on the 

 publication of their own researches. Secondly I had hoped that some 

 postponement of the date of issue might lead to the discovery of more 

 material bearing on the " Fallow Years" 1844 to 1849. This hope has 

 not been fulfilled, and nothing has reached me 1 which in any way 

 supplies the place of the material, which appears to have existed at the 

 date of Galton's death, judging by his own index to his letters. Hardly 

 a letter to him of this period, which would have fixed his habitation 

 and occupation, or have suggested his thoughts and reading, has reached 

 me. The whole of his letters home from Egypt and Syria have 

 perished, and the letters to him from his sisters, which would have 

 told much, have been destroyed. The first realisation of this loss so 

 depressed me, that I almost determined to give up the portraiture of 

 a life, which could thus never be adequately exhibited in some of its 

 most momentous phases. The five years which follow most men's 

 University careers are the most developmental of their lives. No other 

 quinquennium is one of such marked growth, for men usually in this 

 period will start to think and act definitely for themselves ; they must 

 then face the fundamental problems of life relying on their own powers. 

 Ik-re I can tell my reader little or nothing of Francis Galton, and I 

 would merely say that the absence of information is not due to want of 



1 I have endeavoured in vain to trace what has happened to letters written 60 to 

 70 years ago to College friends all long dead. 



