II 



knew. Her method was to fold a strip of paper 

 by doubling, quartering, and so on, into sixteen 

 portions of equal lengths, and to use this strip of 

 paper as a sixteen-foot scale wherewith to draw her 

 rude but graphic plans. One of her children, my 

 dear sister Lucy Harriot Moilliet (1809-1848), had 

 an exceptional faculty for perspective drawing ; she 

 drew elaborate interiors with very little previous 

 instruction. 



As to my other brothers and sisters, they were 

 most diverse in character, yet with a certain common 

 resemblance which struck strangers. I shall have 



o 



occasion to speak more of them later on in the 

 course of my narrative. 



The general result of the foregoing is that I 

 acknowledge the debt to my progenitors of a con- 

 siderable taste for science, for poetry, and for sta- 

 tistics ; also that I seem to have received, partly 

 through the Barclay blood, a rather unusual power 

 of enduring physical fatigue without harmful results, 

 of which there is much evidence when I was young. 

 My father had this power in his early manhood, and 

 it was well marked in my eldest brother and in 

 others of the family. I suffer now from bronchitis 

 with occasional asthma, which has been traced to 

 my great-grandfather, Samuel Galton, and has de- 

 scended in a greater or less degree through all his 

 children who left issue. My father had a strong 

 constitution otherwise, but he suffered terribly from 

 hay asthma, which first attacked him as a youth. I 

 escaped fairly well from any form of it until I was 

 nearly eighty years old ; and it is not hay that 

 especially brings it on now, but warm carpeted rooms. 



