If 



4 Life and Letters of Francis (tolfon 



Theee are very noteworthy omissions in a man who was among tlie foremost 

 anthropoUigists in this country later to study both the psychic and pliysical 

 characters ui man. In the Art of Travfl Gahon liad essentially the needs of 

 the geognipher~in the narrower sense — in view; the physical country is 

 more imixirtant than its inhabitants. It is possible that this is a general 

 rule in life; in youth it is the novelty of the physical environment, hut at 

 a later age it is the novelty of new organic types that forms the intense 

 pleasure of travel'. 



Even as late as 1878 when Galton edited the fourth edition of Hints to 

 Travellers, a useful compendium for traveller issued by the Royal Geo- 

 raphical Society, while we find a section on the "Collection of 01)iects of 

 "atural History" there is no reference to man, and the sole approach to any 

 "Hint" of an anthropological nature in the work is a brief note of 17 lines 

 on p. 71 by the Rev. F. W. Holland describing how paper s(jueezes may be 

 taken of inscriptions. Even the article on photography does not refer to the 

 photography of the natives, or their habitations and occupations. The book 

 is excellent as a guide to the instruments and processes needful to the map- 

 maker; it lacks all that would give the local human colour to the environ- 

 mental description. We are not criticising the book from the standpoint of 

 modern academic geography, which does consider man in relation to the 

 physical environment it depicts. We are merely emphjvsising that Galton in 

 the periofl we are discussing had not yet discovered his real metier — 

 anthropology in its broadest sense. He wsis doing yeoman .service for 

 geography, but the study of man's development, its Icnowable past and 

 probable future, had not yet fascinated him, still less did it domniate his 

 activities. 



The Art of Travel shows us indirectly also how undeveloped Galton's 

 mind was in another direction even in 1860. In the third edition of this 

 book we read: 



"The method of obtaining fire by rubbing sticks together was at one time nearly universal. 

 It seems remarkable that the time of discover}' of the art of fire-making is not recoitled in the 

 Bible. We may ea.sily imagine that our tirst parents obtaine<i tiieir fires from natural sources ; 

 of which, some parts of the Caucasus at least, abound in examples. Hut when Ciiin was sent an 

 outcast, how did he obtain fire? It is remarkable that his descendants are precisely those who 

 invented metallurgy', and arts requiring fire. We might almost theorise to the effect that he or 

 they discovered the art of fire-making, and pushed the discovery into its applications." (p. 27.) 



Then follows the well-known ptissage from Pliny's Natural History on 

 the best wood for fire-sticks. In the fourth edition of the Art of Travel of 

 1867 this passage as to our "first |)arents" and as to Cain as the inventor of 

 fire-sticks has di.sappeared. Between 1860 and 1867 Galton had read and 

 Sfisimilated Darwin's Origin of Species, and in Galton's own words that 

 book had formed "a real crisis in my life" and had driven away "the con- 



' The rule is of course not invariable. The present writer sptmt nmcli time in the Austrian 

 Tyrol in his youth, and was on one occasion askinl to write a handlxM>k to the Tyix)l as one of 

 a Beries of guidebooks to the Alps. Nothing came of the proposal, InMiause he replied that it 

 must in the first place be a guide to the folk-lore, history, art and institutions of the Tyrolese 

 themselves, and in the second place only a route l)ook to valleys, piusses and peaks. 



