Fallow Years, 1844—1849 209 



African work, but the strange thing is that it seemed to absorb 

 his whole nature, and to be done not for the sake of the experience, 

 but in the pure pursuit of occupation. He tells us himself that he 

 " read a good deal all the time, and digested what I read by much 

 thinking about it" [Memories, p. 119). But Galton was never a great 

 student of other men's writings ; he was never an accumulator like his 

 cousin Charles Darwin ; and the most well-i-ead and annotated books 

 in his library certainly belong to a later date and to periods of definite 

 lines of research. Perhaps the words which follow the above quotation, 

 " It has always been my unwholesome way of work to brood much at 

 irregular times," better explain his development during these fallow 

 years. Be this as it may, Galton's pursuit of travel and sport for pure 

 amusement's sake lasted fiiUy five years, but came to an end almost as 

 suddenly and inexplicably as it commenced ; Galton — to use his own 

 words — had finished sowing his "wild oats" by the summer of 1849, 

 and was returning once more to those scientific pursuits, which had 

 been his delight in 1840, and which he was never again to desert 

 except under stress of ill-health. 



Nearly all record of developmental influences during this period 

 having perished, we are thrown back on surmise and hypothesis to 

 account for these fallow years in the life of a man who both before and 

 after was conspicuous for intellectual activity. Naturally we turn in the 

 first place to the many hereditary strands blended in his character. On 

 the one side we have the manifold scientific tastes of the Darwin stock, 

 combined, however, with love for purely country pursuits and with 

 sporting tendencies which have dominated not a few members of both 

 the Darwin and Galton families ; on the other side we have the social 

 aptitudes and the keen love for the pleasui'es of life, which marked and 

 led to the downfall of the Colyear and Sedley stocks, strangely united 

 with the business aptitude and disciplinary sense of the Quaker blood 

 of Farmer and Barclay. If we examine most of Galton's relatives we 

 find one or at most two of these very difterent hereditary strands 

 manifest in the same individual ; but in Galton himself, and pi'obably 

 as source alike of his mental width and of his charm of character, we 

 find these various strands commingled — ^the word is here better than 

 blended — in a single nature. To speak for a moment in the crude 

 language of a current theory of heredity, it is as if opposite allelo- 

 morphs could be united in the same zygote and alternately dominate 

 p. G. 27 



