CHAPTER VI 



FALLOW YEARS, 18441849 



ON October 23rd, 1844, Tertius Galton had died. Francis Galton 

 returned to town and took rooms at 105 Park Street in association 

 with W. F. Gibbs, who afterwards became tutor to Edward VII when 

 he was Prince of Wales, and with H. Vaughan Johnson, who had lived 

 on the same staircase with Galton at Trinity, a man whom Galton 

 describes as singularly attractive and with quaint turns of thought. 

 But we have no letters of these years to guide us ; the letters to his 

 father of course ceased; the letters to his mother and sisters have 

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

 given clues to what Galton was thinking and doing letters which 

 Galton included in an index to his papers made late in life have been 

 destroyed before his papers reached the hands of his biographer. We 

 have no evidence of what this young man of twenty-three, with ample 

 means and intensely vigorous mind and body, was either doing or 

 thinking, reading or observing. Yet we can be certain that in these 

 fallow years, when nothing was published, nothing even written that 

 has remained, there was much ferment and much change. Francis 

 ceased any longer to be "little Francis," the controlled of older brothers 

 and sisters. His desertion of medicine, a profession, hereditary on the 

 maternal side and ardently desired for him by his father, his gradual 

 change from orthodoxy towards agnosticism, were probably disapproved 

 by his family ; his brothers and sisters were settling down to their own 

 individual lives and in more than one case their ideals were not his 

 ideals. As Galton himself expresses it : "I was therefore free, and 

 I eagerly desired a complete change ; besides I had many ' wild oats ' 

 yet to sow 1 ." 



1 Memories of my Life, p. 85. 



