406 Tjife and Letters of Francis Galton 



remarking that Gralton confirmed the accuracy of the 1 to 4 result by an 

 experiment with his favourite dice. The paradox is 



"» good example of the pitfalU into which j)er8on8 are apt to fall, who attempt short cuts in 

 the aolution of problems of chance instead of adhering to the true and narrow road." 



For Galton that "true and narrow road" was the study of tlie possible per- 

 mutations, the road followed by the early masters of the doctrine of chances. 

 We have seen how the "Vox populi ' was — at any rate in the judgment 

 of the meat-weight of fatted oxen — not so far from the truth. Galton, in a 

 paper of twelve yeai-s earlier, endeavoured to test the " Vox judicum'," the 

 reasonablene.ss of the judgments of a presumably educated and trained chvss 

 of minds. Galton expected that the various terms of imprisonment awarded 

 by judges would fall into a continuous series. He limited his data to 

 sentences on males without option of a fine, and he dealt with 830 sentences 

 for terms of years, 10,540 for terms of months and 43,500 for terms of weeks. 

 All these data give what we now term J^-curves — i.e. frequency distributions 

 similar to those of cricket scores, of incomes or rents — the shortest sentences 

 in each case being the most numerous, the longest the least frequent. This 

 is probably the nature of criminality in the population — or as Galton would 

 put it of "true penal deserts." But Galton does not lay stress on this 

 remarkable deviation from the normal curve of distribution. He is con- 

 cerne<l with another phase of this distribution of criminality, namely that it is 

 extraordinarily irregular; there are marked preferences for certain terms of 

 imprisonment. Thus when sentences are reckoned in months, the maxima 

 occur at 3, 6. 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24 months. In 10,540 sentences in months 

 there are none at 17 months, hardly any at 11 or 13 months. Galton argues 

 that three months or a quarter of a year is a round figure that must commend 

 itself to a judge by its simplicity. He suggests that if our year had been 

 divided into 10 periods, then 2^ periods, the equivalent of 3 months, would 

 not have been used in its place, or the same penal deserts would have been 

 treated differently from what they are now. Again, in the distribution of 

 sentences in years, he draws attention to the emphasis on sentences of 3, 5, 

 7 and 10 years, showing a tendency at first to a unit of 2 years and then, 

 presumably guided by a habit of decimal notation, a jump from 7 to 10 years. 

 Galton remarks that while there were 7 sentences for 20 years and 6 for 

 15 years, there were absolutely none for 19, 18, 17 or 16 years. Tenns of 

 weeks are distributed with equal irregularity. Galton argues that the 

 powerful cause of disturbance which interferes with the orderly distribution 

 of punishment in conformity with penal deserts lies in the personal fancies 

 of judges for certain series of numbers. 



"It would be interesting to tabulate the sentences passed by the Hcveral judge« since their 

 appointments, to discover their respective peculiarities and personal equations, all who exercise 

 extensive jurisdiction in criminal cases l)eing included under the title of judge." 



There is no doubt that the idiosyncrasies of some judges in the matter 

 of sentences are as well recognised in the legal profession as by the habitual 

 criminal himself, but is there not another source of the results observed by 



' "Tenns of Imprisonment." Nature, Vol. ui, pp. 174-6, June 20, 1895. 



