208 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



as unreasoning. Speaking on his own initiative to the present writer 

 about a friend who had then recently joined the Catholic Church, he 

 said : " Yes, I think it will be a real help, a controlling factor in X's 

 conduct," and then he added: " How impossible it would all be for you 

 or me !" It appears to the writer that the recognition of the relativity 

 of religion and its individual temperamental value was attained at this 

 time, if a positive view of life which suited his own temperament only 

 came to Galton with the Origin of Species. Much light would doubtless 

 have been thrown on this point had the Egyptian and Syrian letters 

 been preserved. But the fact that they did contain evidence of Galton's 

 religious development may be the very reason why they have wholly 

 perished. 



The years which succeeded Galton's return from Syria are a blank 

 except for what he has himself told us in his Memories, Chapter vm. 

 The four years in question, he himself entitled "Hunting and Shooting." 

 He writes : 



"I returned to my mother and sister, who then occupied Ulaverdon, much in need 

 of a little rest. I was also conscious that with all my varied experiences, I was ignorant 

 of the very ABC of the life of an English country gentleman, such as most of the friends 

 of my family had been familiar with from childhood. I was totally unused to hunting, 

 and I had no proper experience of shooting. This deficiency was remedied during the 

 next three or four years " (Memories, p. 110). 



We find Galton for the following three years spending part of his 

 time in Leamington, hunting with a set chiefly noteworthy for their 

 extravagance and recklessness ; part of his time on Scottish moors, 

 shooting grouse, or sailing in the Hebrides, and lastly part of his time 

 which amounted to weeks and months in London, walking and 

 riding with friends or attending meets of the Royal Stag Hounds. A 

 few letters of Henry Hallam, spared apparently from the holocaust, 

 indicate the thoughts most prominent in the minds of both young 

 men their ambition was to shoot 100 brace in a day, to kill 87 hares 

 in a quarter of an hour, to avoid the tailor-like habit of putting a 

 bullet into the haunch of a stag ; the most provoking thing was to 

 fail in a shot, " I would have given my eyes to have brought the 

 animal down." Landseer was not the man and the artist, but "the 

 crackshot never missing and quite up to all the dodges of the sport ; 

 he had got and shot and killed his animal very neatly." The shoot- 

 ing experience was undoubtedly of value to Galton in his later 





