90 Life and Letters of Francis Gait on 



The summer of 1837 had been spent at Worthing with expeditions 

 on the Downs to Cissbury and Chanctonbury Rings. Frank was studying 

 fishes, making sundials, and riding with his sisters and Darwin. In 

 the preceding Easter he had projected a tour to Bangor, to attend 

 cathedral service there, since he " had never heard it chaunted," then 

 to Sriowdon, Beaumaris, and back by Liverpool and Manchester (Letter 

 to Tertius Galton, March 26, 1837'). I am not certain whether the 

 tour came off. Perhaps it was postponed till the Birmingham and 

 Liverpool Railway was opened. This happened on July 4, and in 

 September Tertius Galton, his daughter Emma and Leonard Horner, 

 travelled from Birmingham to Liverpool, by what is now the London 

 and North-Western Railway, to attend for the first time by train the 

 meeting of the British Association. 



Francis lingered on at the King Edward School for the first half 

 of 1838 2 , but he knew that his time was over, and that freedom and 

 more congenial pursuits were soon to come 3 . His father had arranged 

 that he should enter the General Hospital, Birmingham, at midsummer 

 as House Pupil. The proposal was made at the Weekly Board, 

 December 8, 1837, Rev. John Garbeth, Chairman, "Resolved: That 

 the Secretary do write to Mr Galton informing him that his son will 

 be admitted a Pupil at the Hospital at Midsummer next at the rate of 

 200 guineas per annum." It was afterwards arranged that he should 

 postpone his medical studies till October. His appointment was con- 

 firmed by the Weekly Board, December 29, 1837, R. T. Cadbury being 

 Chairman. Dr Booth, the husband of his aunt Adele, and Mr Joseph 

 Hodgson, who had seen him into the world, seem to have acted as his 

 medical sponsors. This was the bridge, not a very direct one, but 

 of great import in its influence, by which Francis Galton passed from 



' This letter is of considerable interest. Francis discusses quite freely with his 

 father his work in mathematics and his chance of being second in the class. He also 

 discusses with his father the proposition as to the equality of the triangles with two 

 sides of each equal and two not included angles. 



2 A boyish poem on the Spanish Inquisition has survived from March of this year. 

 Without any definite evidence, it seems to me to show signs of the study of Erasmus 

 Darwin's verses. Galton never attained any power as a poet, but from sixteen onwards 

 to the end at least of his Cambridge days, he was very fond of making occasional verses. 



3 In his last school letter to his father, chiefly about the medical man he was to live 

 with in Birmingham, and his gratitude for the new educational departure, Francis notes 

 that the Doctor is " sworn in to-day at Jersey " ; he, too, was leaving the field of battle. 



