28 Life ami Letters of Francis Gaiton 



offering an annual gold medal to be coni])eted for by public school boys. 

 He afterwards took a cojisiderable part in tbe agitation which ended in the 

 recognition of geography jus an academic study. 



Cialton was active in many other ways for the cause of geography. In 

 180 1 he was asked to give the Church Missionary Society some information 

 as to Zanzibar ius a possible centre of missionary enterprise, having regard to 

 its climate, physical features and the moral and social condition of the people. 

 Galton read a paper to the society on June 1st and it is published in their 

 journal T/ie Mis/tion Field'. In the paper he points out the dominant Arab 

 and Moslem influence which radiated from Zanzibar, not only all along the 

 coast of the mainland but far into the continent, periiaps one-third across. 

 Galton gave his infornmtion from manuscript notes of Burton and from 

 photographs of (Jrant lent by Speke. Galtcm on the whole spoke well of the 

 Arabs, but ill of the negro natives of the mainland, thus following Burton 

 rather than Speke. He concluded as follows: 



"The natives are most assuredly no inquirinf; race, open to influence, but the very contrary. 

 Again tlieir countries are intersected Ijy coimnercial routes through which a tide of Moslem 

 ideas is constantly flowing, and could h handful of missionaries, looking at past and present 

 history to guide us in our speculations, Ix' supposed to avail against it? It strikes nie, too, as 

 something not (|uitc generous to avail ourselves of the courtesy and the unusual tolerance of a 

 Moslem power to sow seeds of a certain harvest of discord. What we find in Zanzibar is a far- 

 reaching and far-influencing, but not a strong power; anxious to do well, seeking to consolidate 

 itst^lf, amenable to a good English influence, hut above all things, the gine qud non of its existence 

 is that it should l)e Moslem. With our very limited missionary agency, it seems to me that we 

 should tlivert its current to healthier and more hopeful fields than Zanzibar, and that England, 

 so far as she may interfere at all, whether through her representative or by any other agency, 

 should try to effect the following results: To relieve the Sultan, by means of our moral support, 

 from the embarrassment of foreign pressure; to promote safe lines of legitimate and civilising 

 traflic into the far interior of Africa; and to open Ijetter conmiunication between Zanzibar and 

 the more civilised world than now exists. This is the schedule of what England is a<:tually 

 doing, and I further believe it is all she ought, for the present, to undertake in Zanzibar'." 



This is not the first, nor the last, occasion on which Galton' emphtisised 

 the po.ssibly su|)erior civilising effect of M(^slem8 over Christians on bar- 

 barous races. Of course he speaks here of the state of affairs in 1861, 

 before the medical work (India and C^hina) or the craft-school factor 

 (Nigeria) had been added to the purely religious activities of the Christian 

 missionaries. There is a cliaracteristic table of the Zanzibar climate on 

 p. 124, detailing the wind, the rainy, cold and hot .sea.sons and the seasonal 

 healthiness; the paper probably has now fdlen much behind the present 

 state of knowledge. 



In 1862 Galton took Sir Roderick Murchison's place, who fell ill ju.st 

 before the meeting, as President of the Geographical Section of the British 

 As.sociation. If he gave any opening address, it was certainly a makeshift 

 effort and has not been published. Mrs Galton merely notes that her 

 husband was at Cambridge for the As.sociation\ Ten years later, however, 

 1872, Galton was again President of the same section and gave the cus- 



' Vol. VI, No. 66, pp. 121-30. > Loe. cil. p. 130. » See Vol. i, p. 207. 



' Galton recounts an amusing incident of the meeting in his Memories, pp. 208-9. 



