The Ancestry of Francis Gallon 



55 



brothers he was in a position to become a country gentleman, and he 

 himself says that, when aged 24 he returned from Syria, 



" I was conscious that with all my varied experience 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. Tliis deficiency was remedied during the next 

 three or four years. Under the advice of my eldest brother, I bought a hunter and 

 a hack, and began to hunt at the rate of about three days per fortnight in Warwickshire 

 and at neighbouring meets " (^Memories, p. 110). 



But something else mastered this ancestral instinct. Galton was 

 not to revert to the land and after six years the Wanderlust again 

 sent him forth on his travels. If we knew the little difference which 

 divides one man from another, even within the same family, we should 

 have the key to most of life's riddles. Of one thing we can be certain, 

 it is not slight variations of environment; it is the individuality of 

 nature not of nurture. 



If we endeavour to sum up the fairly detailed account we have 

 given of Francis Galton 's kinships, can we attribute to their different 

 sources some of the chief physical and mental characters we note in 

 him 1 The following may be emphasised as marked features of Francis 

 Galton : 



Physical, (a) Marked longevity, [h) Very considerable physical 

 strength and power of endurance, (c) A well knit figure somewhat 

 above the average height and not tending to corpulence, (d) Regular 

 features, with nothing unfinished, or at all unkempt about the person, 

 generally what are described as "good looks." {e) Blue eyes and 

 light hair. (/) Ailments, asthma and deafness, [g) Good digestion. 



Of these physical (jualities the marked longevity seems to have 

 come from Elizabeth Collier ; the physical strength from the Camerons 

 and Barclays ; the well-knit figure and good looks possibly from Beau 

 Colyear', though Samuel Galton the second possessed them in a marked 

 degree. The blue eyes and fair hair were again probably a Barclay 

 heritage ; the asthma, and also possibly the deafness, a Galton charac- 

 ter — both Samuel Tertius and his father Samuel suffered badly from 

 asthma. Thus we realise that in most of his physical characters 

 Francis Galton was not a Darwin ; Darwin physical characters have 



' Of Sir Heni-y Savile it was said that he was " an extraordinary handsome man, 

 no lady having a finer complexion." 



