SIR FRANCIS GALTON, D.Sc., F.R.S. 



Sir Francis Galtox, D.Sc. F.R.S. . who closed 

 a long life of many and useful activities on Tuesda\", 

 fanuary 17th, after a very brief illness, was born on 

 Februar\- 16th. 1822. He came of a long-lived 

 familv. a fact on whicli it does not seem superfluous 

 to dwell, seeing how great a stress Sir Francis Galton 

 laid on parentage and family in determining the 

 characteristics of the individual. To his kindred 

 and ancestrv he attributed not merely his physical 

 and mental attributes, but his predilections and his 

 length of years. A reference to his work on 

 " Noteworthy Families," which was compiled chiefl\' 

 bv reference to the Fellows of the Royal Societ\', 

 discloses that on one side he sprang from the Galtons 

 and the Barclays, and on the other from the 

 Darwins. Among the Barclays was that Captain 

 Barcla\- who astonished the earl\- Victorian world 

 bv walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, 

 and it was to this strain that Sir Francis was 

 accustomed to refer his own unusual power of 

 enduring physical fatigue without harmful results. 

 His longevity he attributed to the Darwins, and 

 some of his mental powers must have been inherited 

 from the same fount : but his paternal grandfather 

 was a scientific man as well as a good man of 

 business, and the Barclays, apart from the peripatetic 

 Captain, were bankers. It was, however, to the 

 commingling of ancestors that he owed, as he obser\'ed 

 in his Reminiscences, a considerable taste for science, 

 for statistics, and for poetrv. 



His education was not less composite than the 

 qualities which were bequeathed to him b\- his 

 progenitors. His mother would have had him 

 become a physician like his grandfather. Dr. 

 Erasmus Darwin. But he developed a mathe- 

 matical gift and, after a boyhood spent at two 

 French schools and one English grammar school, he 

 went up to Cambridge as a mathematical aspirant. 

 His fine health failed him there, however, and after a 

 severe illness he left the University with nothing 

 better than a pass degree. He used to say in after 

 vears that when he found himself one dav elected 

 to an Honorary Fellowship of Trinity College, he 

 was so surprised that he thought it \\'as a mistake. 

 After Cambridge he walked the London hospitals, 

 but here again he failed to find his vocation, and the 

 death of his father found him \\ ith his career in life 

 still undetermined. So, having private means, he 

 went, like many another in the same case, on his 

 travels. But his " wanderjahre " was prolonged. 

 It comprised the Soudan as far as Khartoum — in 

 the pre- Khalifa days — Syria and Palestine, all viewed 

 under conditions very different from those of to-da}". 

 But his travels were actually his first passport to the 

 world of scientific research, for in 1854 the Royal 

 Geographical Society- awarded him its medal for his 

 explorations of Damaraland and Xamaqualand. 



But before that his marriage (in 1853) had settled 

 him in England : and he began to interest himself 

 specially in meteorology. He was associated with 



that Roxal Obserwatory at Kew which is now a 

 landmark for golfers ; and among the important and 

 permanent measures which arose from the associa- 

 tion were the standardising of se.;iants and other 

 angular measuring instruments, the verification of 

 tliermometers. tli' Kew rating of watches. Under 

 Dr. Francis Gail:oii. the old Kew observatory 

 became the first English Reichsanstalt ; the primi- 

 tive ancestor of the National Ph\-sical Laboratories 

 at Bushey. He did lasting work in meteorology 

 \\hile at Kew, and the term "anti-cyclone" as 

 descriptive of a weather type which lately has over- 

 hung the larger part of Western Europe, was of his 

 coining. The counter-clockwise movement of winds 

 in cyclones had been appreciated and understood 

 before his time, but the movements of the comple- 

 mentary atmospheric systems had received hardl\- 

 any notice or explanation. 



It is, however. Galton's work in heredity which 

 seems now to ha\'e been his most important contribu- 

 tion to science. Heredit\- had al\\a\s interested 

 him ; and his researches may be said to have been 

 based on Gauss's theorem. Gauss supposed all 

 variabilit\' to be due to different and equallv probable 

 combinations of a variet}- of causes. Galton desired 

 to test this theorem by the light of those character- 

 istics of human kind which are measurable. He 

 therefore set up. in 1884, an Anthropometric Labora- 

 tory, in which were measured the more obvious 

 characteristics, such as height, weight, span of arms, 

 and so on, as well as the less obvious ones of keen- 

 ness of sight, colour sense, lung capacity, reaction 

 time, personal equation in various aspects. B)' 

 examination of data thus derived he hoped to find 

 what influence parentage had on the physical attri- 

 butes of offspring — and for a generation he preached 

 the multiplication and usefulness of such labora- 

 tories. It was while examining the Bertillon system 

 of anthropometrx' that Galton developed another 

 measurement of idiosA'ucrasv — the finger print — 

 though in his Reminiscences he is careful to 

 sa\' that Sir William Herschel in India had 

 experimented with finger prints as a method of 

 identification since 1887 ; he gave priority of 

 method to Mr. Henry Faulds, who is still living. As 

 a necessar\- corollar\-. if indeed it may not be more 

 properly described as the fount and well-spring 

 of his work in anthropometry, arose his investigations 

 in that science of " Eugenics," to which he gave 

 its name ; and which is the science (of right breeding) 

 that aims at the discovery in man of those qualities 

 which are desirable for his survival and progression. 

 One may say in summation of his theoretic position, 

 that he was a disciple of Weissmann rather than 

 of Hering or of Butler : and that he was 

 tempted to reduce the conditions of inheritance to 

 a mathematical formula, as Pearson and the 

 geometricians seek to do, and to suppose that 

 each ancestor contributes a share to the in- 

 dividual proportional to the distances of relationship. 



45 



