The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 



45 



Buttons in this letter of Samuel Galton the second, and although 

 Priestley did not venture, perhaps for the sake of his friends, to face 

 Biimingham, Samuel Galton continued to give an annual benefaction 

 towards the cost of his researches. 



The fact that Samuel the first sent his son to the Warrington 

 Academy — while absolutely consistent with the toleration preached by 

 Robert Barclay — indicates that he had already departed somewhat 

 from tlie religious teaching of the Society of Friends. He also had 

 been concerned in the gun-trade with James Farmer. But in 1795 

 Samuel Galton was formally disowned by the Society of Friends "for 

 fabricating and selling instruments of war," after the matter had been 

 for several years agitated. Galton entirely disregarded the disownment 

 and went on attending the meetings until his death in 1832. The 

 position of the Society was, I think, only consistent with their doctrines, 

 but the disownment ought to have come much earlier — even to Samuel 

 the first'. If the statement be correct, that the Society continued to 

 receive Samuel Galton's donations, then the disownment was certainly 

 of a very specious character. Both Samuel Galton and his wife Lucy 

 (Barclay) lived and died as Quakers and were buried in the burying 

 ground attached to the Quakers' meeting-house in Bull Street (see 

 Plate XXXII). There is little doubt, however, that both Samuel the 

 first, and Samuel the second, the friend of Priestley and Erasmus 

 Darwin", had pi'ogressed from Quakerism a considerable way towards 



' In the British Museum is an interesting tract by Samuel Galton, "To the 

 Friends of the Monthly Meeting at Birmingham " 1795. It points out that for 70 years 

 his grandfather (i.e. Farmer), his uncle (John G.) and his father (Samuel G.) had Ijeen 

 engaged in the business without animadversion on the part of the Society, that the trade 

 had devolved upon him as an inheritance. That to be consistent no member of the 

 Society ought to pay taxes to a Government which prepared for war, or for preserving the 

 peace in case of riots. Men were not responsible for the abuse of what they manu- 

 factured. He declines to give any pledge to the Society with respect to abandoning 

 his business ; when he did withdraw, it should be from spontaneous sentiment and not 

 from external influence. All is in excellent conmion sense and full of characteristic 

 stubbornness, but his position was undoubtedly a false one judged by Quaker principles. 

 Actually he gave up the gun business eight years later, three years after his father's 

 death. 



- Erasmus Darwin was regarded as almost an atheist by Anna Sewaril, and 

 Mrs .Schinimelpenninck, referiing to Dr Darwin, says : " I was thus in a state of mind 

 to receive evil from a new and hurtful influence which now approached our family 

 circle" {Life, p. 126). And again, "I had been much in the society of freethinkers" 

 (p. 441). 



