398 Life and Litters of Frmiciji Galton 



anthropometric laboratory, and this arrangement lasted till 1890. He insists 

 largely on the value of such anthropometric records for the identification 

 of nulividuals, and cit«.s the claims made for them by Beitillon, Topinanl 

 and Uerbette. He describes further the index-system of Bcntillon: 



"Whether all that was claimed for the power of M. Bertillon'H system, on purely theoretical 

 grounds and in his earlier publications, can Ix? sustained, may fiiirly l)e questiontHJ; but there 

 can be no doubt that a series nf measurements must Iw of considi^rable service us supplementary 

 e%"idence, either that a jx-rson is really the man he professes to be, or negatively that he is not 

 the man for whom he is taken. In speaking of these matters it is impossible not to allude to 

 the Tichbume trial, and the enonnous waste of money, effort, and anxiety which might have 

 been spared, had Itoger Tichborne passed thn>ugh an anthropometric laboratory before he 

 went abroad. It would be a reasonable precaution for every person alxiut to leave his country 

 for a long time, having regard to the various accidents of good or ill fortune, to l)e pro^wrly 

 measured, and to leave a cop}' of his measurements in the safe keeping of an anthropometric 

 laboratory." (p. 252.) 



"Another and very important question is as to the degree in which the several bodily pro- 

 portions that are measured may be looked upon as independent variables. The stature is relat^xl 

 with the length of the ftwt, and with that of the forearm, and we should exjxsct a still clost^r 

 relation to exist between any two of these taken together, and the tliinl. We have yet to learn 

 the proportion between the number of the elements measured and their value for purposes of 

 identification. The supposition that they may be treated as independent variables, which lies 

 at the bottom of some of the earlier estimates, such as that on page 22 of the Conference at 

 Home ' headed ' Ktendue infinie de la Classification,' cannot be accepted as correct. 



The whole subject of 'Personal Identification and Description' forms an important chaptiT 

 of anthropological research, and it is one on which I hope before long to be in a position to 

 offer some views of my own." (p. 354.) 



The careful reader of this passage will note how Galton is beginning lo 

 realise the problems of multiple regression, and to see that witli a large 

 number of coi-related variables, there is a limit to the intensity of the multi[)le 

 correlation coefficient, which cannot be indefinitely increased by incresusing 

 the number. We also see liow he is studying the coiTelation of bodily 

 characters and gradually advancing beyond the nidexing by such characters 

 to a method of his own — the identifictition by finger-prints. 



Galton's fourth presidential address, that of 1889, we have already dis- 

 cussed (see our p. 38.3), and the reader who turns back to our account 

 will have some appreciation of how the ideas of the 1888 address had l)een 

 developed in the interval. Besides working out the fundamental ideas con- 

 cerning correlation and heredity to which Galton was led by his "Family 

 Records" and the data from his Anthropometric Laboratory, he con- 

 tribut«<l lannerous short papers on anthropometric and statistical topics to 

 various journals during this period and later at intervals. 



H. MISCELLANEOUS STATISTICAL PAPERS 



(i^ The Horse. The horse had always been a favourite animal with him, 

 notwithstanding his experiences with the camel in Syria and the ox in 

 Damaraland, and no less than four of his papers treat of the horse under 

 various conditions in addition to his paper on standard photographs of horses 



' I^ouis IlerbetU; and Alphonso Bertillon : " I^es Signalemcnts Anthrojxjmetriqued," Con- 

 /frence /aiU au f'orujrrM /'hiittnliairc Jn Rome^ Ma.ssr)n, Paris, 1S8G. 



