194 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



and those who loved the open-hearted joyous youth best must have 

 felt, if they did not give expression to the feeling, that the loss of his 

 father vras an irreparable loss, which had spoilt Galton's career. 

 Knowing what we now do of Galton's later work, we can see that this 

 period of freedom may not have been wholly without value. Yet we 

 may wonder whether had his medical education been completed and 

 the fi'eedom come later, Galton might not have entered on his life-work 

 with somewhat more knowledge and with even greater insight into its 

 scope and the possibilities of his mission to his fellow-men. 



It would be difficult to sum up the balance of good and ill which 

 flowed to Galton from his Cambridge career. He went to Cambridge 

 keen to observe and measure, full of the creative, inventive, contriving 

 spirit. In these directions Cambridge gave him little or nothing. The 

 mathematical tripos was the only door to an honours degree, and he 

 never passed fully through the analysis, which should have led him 

 to the physical branches, where he would have profited most highly. 

 Even there he would have met theory alone — no observation and no 

 experiment. Hopkins and Cayley were not the teachers for a man 

 like Galton — such a man would have developed rapidly under a Franz 

 Neumann, a Helmholtz, or a Kelvin. As it was his thoughts turned 

 largely into other channels than the routine work of mathematical 

 honours. He became a centre of much social life, of literary ambitions 

 and of varied and somewhat scattered purposes. I do not think that 

 we can fairly say that the competitive work for the mathematical 

 tripos was the sole source of Francis Galton's breakdown at Cambridge. 

 It had largely to do with his mathematical studies, but it was the 

 impossible attempt to combine those studies with a very wide range 

 of other interests and occupations, which finally led to his academic 

 failure. The men with whom Galton associated, the Kays, Buxton, 

 Johnson, Hallam, and Maine were not men of one interest or a single 

 idea. Galton, as well as his friends, strived to cram too much into 

 the brief years of undergraduateship — hard work, hard play, late 

 hours and conviviality all told : — the renunciation of honours, the eager 

 retvirn to medical studies, the pledge in the last year of college life, 

 were not isolated factors, but symptoms of a growing restlessness, — 

 not one thing alone accounted for his breakdown. He tried too much 

 and he failed. Cambridge had not given him the training he needed, 

 it did not bring him in touch with the helpful older mind, that it 



