4 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



profit by their school education, by their college careers, by their 

 professional training, or by their early travels. There was a period 

 when Galton's fate seemed to hang in the balance, when it appeared 

 as if he would become an English country gentleman, whose pleasure 

 lay in sport and whose aim in life was good comradeship. Then the 

 instinct for creative action mastered his nature, and every apparent 

 failure of the past seemed to have borne, not bitter fruit, but a golden 

 experience essential to labours, which the reaper had never foreseen 

 when he garnered his harvest. That conception is the key to the first 

 thirty years of Galton's life. It will be found, we think, a clue to the 

 lives of many men of power, who strive in turn to-wards numerous goals, 

 before they have learnt to realise their fitting sphere of achievement. 

 Such apprenticeship with all its possible bungling, such Lehr- und 

 Wanderjahre, can only be reckoned as idle when the matured journey- 

 man fails to produce his masterpiece. 



Of one thing we are certain, that the reader, who will follow 

 patiently our hero through the great and the little, through the 

 apparently trivial and the apparently vital incidents of this story, 

 cannot fail to fall in love with a nature, which met life so joyously, 

 and from childhood to extreme old age was resolved to see life at its 

 best and be responsive to its many-sided experiences. Because Galton 

 was a specialist in few, if any directions, because he appreciated with- 

 out stint many forms of human activity, he was able to achieve in 

 many spheres, where the established powers with greater craftsmanship 

 but narrower outlook had failed to recognise that there were still 

 verities to be ascertained. In the " fallow years " Galton wandered 

 joyously through life, but he had been and he had seen, and he was 

 thus trained, as few specialists are trained, to achieve in a marked 

 degree. 



