Characterisation, especially by Letters 461 



Your note is a wonderful proof how well some few people in this world can write and express 

 themselves at an advanced age. It is enough to make one not fear so much the advance of age, 

 as I often do, though you must think me quite a youth ! 



With my best thanks, pray believe me with much respect, 



Your affectionate nephew, Charles Darwin. 



Letters to George Darwin, Esq.* 



British Association, Bradford. Wednesday, Sept. 24, 1873. 



The paper came off yesterday and, as an amusing fact, Carpenter had afterwards to speak 

 about some "current" questions and found the mercator's map of the north parts so inscrutable 

 that he left it and went to your globe to point out to the audience what he meant. 



The application that most commends itself at present to me, is to have the hexagon-pentagon 

 map on the scale of about a 9 ft. globe, to mount the map on screens, stoutly made (? with pro- 

 jecting mouldings to represent the mountain chains, made by pasting a few successive contours 



upon it), and to have a couple of stout frames to hang them on, one having a hexagon and the 

 other a pentagon as its middle compartment. 



1 will take care, and I am sure Strachey will too, that the plan gets properly discussed at the 

 Geographical Here, in a room full of ladies and no one to understand, it is impossible to do so. 



I have often thought of procuring a really artistically made and coloured globe and once 

 had much correspondence about it. Ruskin wrote a very good letter. It seems to me that one 

 might set to work by making a spherical shell, then cutting it up into convenient parts like 

 a puzzle-map, and mounting the parts that were temporarily wanted on a convex table for 

 consultation. These could be multiplied by casts, also by electro-type. 



With my kindest remembrances to all your party. Ever yours, Francis Galton. 



(I return off and on to London.) •">, Bertie Terrace, Leamington. Oct. 3, 1873. 



My DSAB Dakwin, Mr Qeach forwarded your note. I extracted the enclosure and sent it 

 to him. Also 1 sent for the Contempvrary, but instead of the August they sent the number of 

 this month with quite another subject of yours; but I will get the August one. 



I am most grieved to hear of your Father's recent illness, but I firmly believe in his powerful 

 underlying constitutional powers as sure to assert themselves whenever there is real need. 



Do you know or has Dr Clark t heard of that half incredible but uncontradicted assertion 

 made in a long paper at Bradford before a rooM crowded with physiologists, that albumen mixed 

 with water in a short time becomes undistinguishable from the contents of the lacteals, 

 white corpuscli that you could assimilate it without any stomach at all!) and the 



very practical conclusion was drawn that if an egg be broken into cold water (just as it is broken 

 into hot water for poaching) and left to stand 12 hours, it becomes opaque, — then if you boil 

 the whole affair slightly, the result is a food that the author asserted to be digestible when 

 nothing else could be digested! 



It seems worth trying. 



I enclose a printed solution of a problem which I received yesterday and which I think 

 (and hopi') may interest you. I sent the question to the Educational Times some months ago, 

 when a .Mr Can- of Woolwich gave an answer making a frightful mull of it, — a total miscon- 

 ception. Then I asked Watson who got the enclosed very elegant result, but still it is not one 

 of practical applicability. Is it really hopeless to obtain a more manageable solution? 



Would you please send me back the paper in a few days as I want to have it put in the 

 Statistical Society Journal and I have no other copy. 



* Later .Sir Oeorge Darwin, second son of Charles Darwin. 

 t Afterwards the well-known consultant, Sir Andrew Clark. 



