The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 25 



to see beyond. He never waited to see who was following him, he 

 pointed out the new land to biologist, to anthropologist, to psychologist, 

 to meteorologist, to economist, and left them to follow or not at their 

 leisure 1 . He left others to settle and develop ; his joy was in rapid 

 pioneer work in a wide range of fields. If the world did not under- 

 stand and accept, he would leave them thirty or forty years to consider 

 it, until after many other wanderings he came to that land again to 

 find an altered state of scientific knowledge and of public opinion. This 

 love of travel for its own sake, the Wanderlust, which for many of us 

 was largely the secret of Galton's power, was hardly Darwinian, we 

 believe it came partly through the Colyears which explains its 

 appearance in a lessened form in Francis Darwin but partly through 

 the Barclay-Cameron and Button strains, as we shall indicate later. 



The second child of Erasmus Darwin and Elizabeth Collier sister 

 of Sir Francis Darwin who comes especially under our ken is Frances 

 Ann Violetta, shortly Violetta Darwin, the mother of Francis Galton 

 (see Plate XX). She inherited many qualities from her mother, 

 Elizabeth Collier, and although she bears the name of Darwin we 

 must not look upon her as a pure Darwin. Much of her joyous 

 unconventional nature was undoubtedly from the ancestry of Elizabeth 

 Collier. She was by no means a Quaker by instinct, and the Quaker, 

 Samuel Tertius Galton when aged 33, seems to have been baptised as 

 an adult (Jan. 18, 1816) at Radbourne Church probably owing to her 

 influence. Her pictures as a young bride show her to have possessed 



1 Francis Galton himself realised this to the full. Thus he writes as follows in his 

 Inquiries into Human Faculty : 



"My general object has been to take note of the varied hereditary faculties of 

 different men, and of the great differences in different families and races, to learn how 

 far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stocks by 

 better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts 

 as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more 

 rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course. The subject 

 is, however, so entangled with collateral considerations that a straightforward step-by- 

 step inquiry did not seem to be the most suitable course. I thought it safer to proceed 

 like the surveyor of a new country, and endeavour to fix in the first instance as truly 

 as I could the position of several cardinal points" (p. 2). 



Six years later in the Natural Inheritance (p. 2) he again describes his work in much 

 the same spirit, that of a pioneer building a high level road into a new country, 

 affording wide views in unexpected directions and easy descents to novel and not yet 

 mapped districts. 



p. G. 4 



