442 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



aids them, but it would be of no service to you and me." Thus he would 

 explain to his biographer that sympathy in expression and action which 

 might not unreasonably appear irreconcilable with his own faith. Without 

 being deeply interested in history he had, as every man of culture, an under- 

 standing for the past; he realised that each worn-out phase of mankind's 

 mental evolution is not a ruin to serve as a quarry for to-day's uses, but 

 rather a monument to be preserved, even fenced about to protect it from 

 the ravages of the profit-seeker, or indeed from the sacrilege of the scoffer. 

 It is in this spirit that the reader must weigh some of the letters of Galton 

 and some of the statements about him in the following pages. Galton was 

 as strong an agnostic as Darwin or Huxley, but he was not, like the latter, 

 an iconoclast; as I will venture to put it, the stirps of Galton and Darwin 

 had a more generous historical background than that of Huxley, and this 

 even more so in Galton's case. He has spoken in several places of the 

 unconscious working of the mind. There is a conscious family tradition, and 

 again an unconscious one; our mentality is what it is in accordance with the 

 tradition of our stirp, and works unwittingly in the track of the past. The 

 Galton stirp — witness its quakers and its devout catholics — had a deep 

 religious sense — not unbroken by a tendency to wander at times from the 

 current phases of morals and of religion, but it had also a kingly spirit in 

 the best sense of the words — an understanding of the nature and the needs 

 of those dependent upon it. Roll into one the characteristics of the Planta- 

 genet, the Stewart, the Savile, the Sedley and the Darwin stirps, and we 

 can thus, and only thus, fully appreciate the complex nature of Galton's 

 mind. We can trace therein his impulse towards travel, his fallow years, 

 his inventive genius, his sympathy with deeply religious natures, his zeal for 

 knowledge, and his mirthfulness. Width of mind in any individual usually 

 takes its origin in the happy combination of several stirps of strong but 

 diverse intellectual character. A danger arises when intimates, especially 

 relatives, appraise a great and wide-minded man; they are apt to emphasise 

 that side of his character which has appealed most strongly to them, and of 

 which for that very reason he may have sounded the note. In the case of 

 blood relatives that note may be the characteristic of the part of their stirp 

 common to both, or indeed, if they are of the full blood, as brothers, the one 

 may be dominated exclusively by one factor of their common stirp *. 



In reading family letters written originally for no other eyes than those 

 of the recipients, we must ever bear this in mind. When a man soars above 

 his fellows to altitudes they have not yet attained, it is only natural that 

 his intercourse with them should remain largely on the old plane familiar to 

 all of them. The letters of Galton show him as son, as brother, as uncle, 

 and as great-uncle — those which might have limned him in his courtship 

 and marriage failed to reach his biographer. Yet the letters which I have 

 seen, apart from their bearing on Galton's own history, cover upwards of a 

 century of family life, and are in themselves witness to the great changes 



* Thus in the children of Charles Darwin one marks in isolation factors which were 

 comhined in their father and great-grandfathers. 



