210 Life and Letters of Francis Gal to it 



its characteristics. These fallow years show the dominance of deter- 

 minants of which we are fully conscious in tracing Galton's family 

 history, but which after 1850 play only a subordinate, albeit a graceful 

 part in his character and activities. In 1849 Galton's mechanical tastes 

 revived and his scientific bent came once more to its rights. When 

 the " spring-fret " again came o'er him, he knew his " naked soul " and 

 had found a congenial purpose in life. 



In the failure of any record of environmental influence', we can 

 only attribute the difference between the Soudanese and the Central 

 African journeys to the not unfamiliar experience of different hereditary 

 tendencies developing potency at successive stages of an individual's 

 growth. Charles Darwin was a student and naturalist from his College 

 days ; Francis Galton's six fallow years threw back his work in life, 

 so that much of it was achieved at an age when most minds grow 

 quiescent. But the delay was not greatly to his, nor, in the long run, 

 to the public disadvantage. His earlier papers on the improvement of 

 the human race by conscious selection v/ere nearly stillborn, they faced 

 a world quite unripe for the ideas Galton had to teach. The acceptance 

 of the principle of Natural Selection and the recognition of science as 

 a capital authority in human affairs had to make marked progress 

 before Galton's teaching could reach its audience, and produce its 

 effect. 



' We know how the publication of the Origin of Species moved Francis Galton. At 

 first it seemed to the writer of this biography that the voyage of the " Beagle " might 

 have turned Galton's thoughts to scientific travel, but the Jozirnal of that voyage 

 appeared in 1837, five or six years after the voyage, and there is no reference to it in 

 Galton's letters of that date or later. The famous Linnaean Society publication made 

 jointly with Wallace dates from 1858, when Galton had already settled down to 

 scientific work. 



