CHAPTER I 



FOREWORD 



To more than one reader of this biography the death of Francis 

 Galton, following within five years that of one of the keenest of his 

 friends and lieutenants, Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, meant not 

 only the loss of a revered leader, but of another personal friend and 

 counsellor. Some of my readers will remember quite recent visits, and 

 fertile talk in the white-enamelled, sunlit drawing-room at Rutland 

 Gate, with its collection of Darwin, Galton and Barclay relics ; the table 

 at which Erasmus Darwin wrote, alongside the easel with its powerful, 

 if unfinished, portrait by Furse, telling — as the highest phase of art 

 alone can tell — why and even how Francis Galton inspired men. To 

 such visitors anything written here must appear incomplete and one- 

 sided ; the atmosphere of a really great man — and such unquestionably 

 Francis Galton was — cannot be reproduced in words ; the tones of 

 voice, the subtle sequences in phases of thought, the characteristic 

 combinations of physical expression and of mental emphasis, which 

 make the personality, can only be suggested by a great master' of words, 

 or at best outlined by a famous craftsman ; the student of science, 

 unless he be endowed with a poet's inspiration, must fail to provide even 

 such adumbration. Nor again is it easy to portray the essential features 

 of a man who is at least one generation older than yourself There are 

 in life two barriers between man and man more marked, perhaps, than 

 any others, the reticence of age to youth, and the reticence of age to 

 age. The friends we have grown up with from our youth, whose 

 emotions and beliefs have been moulded under like physical and mental 

 environments, we may perhaps truly know ; we have caught their 

 individuality before age laid constraint on its fullest expression. But 

 the friends of adult life have no common mental history — the com- 

 munity of like growth fails them ; they stand to each other even as 

 great civilised nations whose culture and art may be revered and 

 understood, whose knowledge and customs aid but do not replace home 



p. G. 1 



