The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 57 



nature arose from the same source. Although a most distinguished 

 mathematician has appeared in the Darwin stock, and it is stated 

 that Erasmus Darwin the younger was statistically minded, there was 

 no trace of it in Erasmus the elder, and it may be safely said that 

 statistics were almost distasteful to Charles Darwin himself. On the 

 other hand Samuel Tertius Galton, as we have already seen, published 

 a statistical tract, and he and quite a number of his family delighted in 

 numerical and statistical representation. There is hardly a doubt that 

 this was in Francis Galton an emphasised Galton heritage, not wholly 

 unassociated with considerable power of fine draughtsmanship, which we 

 also find in other members of the family. During many years of friend- 

 ship with Francis Galton, his present biographer never saw him handle 

 the pencil nor had any reason to believe he had special aptitude in this 

 matter ; and yet examining his earlier notebooks and diaries we find 

 them full of sketches which show that he had equal capacity with his 

 sisters in draughtsmanship. When we read also the accounts of the 

 work of his Galton ancestry in Birmingham, the manner in which they 

 not only built up a great business, but also were continually engaged 

 in public and charitable work, we must again place to their credit the 

 passion Galton exhibited to turn all his work to public service to 

 regard all science as subservient to human progress. He was not 

 content that the Eugenics Laboratory should produce merely scientific 

 memoirs ; he repeatedly urged its members to place their results in a 

 popular form before a wider public. He disliked technical terms, and 

 demanded the expression of results in language that all men can 

 understand. Probably he and the present writer were not quite at 

 one on this point, partly because the latter believed that new technical 

 terms are needful in every progressive branch of science, partly because 

 the writer thought that Biometry and Eugenics must in the first place 

 establish themselves by the production of work especially appealing to 

 the scientific world. Francis Galton pulled his way, and his biographer 

 pulled in the opposite, both, perhaps, with something of Quaker stubborn- 

 ness, but never with the least personal friction, and in the end came 

 the compromise which marks the publications of the Galton Laboratory 

 and the directions for its guidance in his will. Reference is made to 

 these matters here because it must be fully realised that the social 

 utility of his work was not a secondary but a primary motive in Galton's 

 character. Charles Darwin thought that to add to the sum of knowledge 



