PREFACE 



A GAIN after a long interval the third and final volume of this Life appears. 

 Xx The delay is traceable to the same difficulties as arose in the case of the 

 second volume, namely the high cost of producing nowadays a work of this 

 character. As it was the generous help of Mr Lewis Haslam which enabled 

 the second volume to be printed, so I have to record my gratitude to two 

 friends who have assisted me to obtain the funds requisite on the present 

 occasion. In the first place Professor Henry A. Ruger of Columbia University, 

 New York, a former postgraduate worker in the Galton Laboratory, interested 

 Miss Dorothy Chase Rowell in Galton's writings, and in the second place 

 Dr F. A. Freeth reported my need to Mr Henry Mond. I wish to place on 

 record here my deep gratitude to Miss Rowell and Mr Mond, whose gifts so 

 far supplemented the proceeds of the sales of the first two volumes that 

 I ventured to send the third to press. 



It may be said that a shorter and less elaborate work would have supplied 

 all that was needful. I do not think so, and there are two aspects of' the 

 matter to which I should like to refer. The writer of biographies usually 

 belongs to the literary world, and is too often a minor light of that world. 

 I have no claim to literary distinction of any order. I have written my ac- 

 count because I loved my friend and had sufficient knowledge to understand 

 his aims and the meaning of his life for the science of the future. I have 

 had to give up much of my time during the past twenty years to labour 

 which lay outside my proper field, and that veiy fact induced me from the start 

 to say, that if I spend my heritage in writing a biography it shall be done to 

 satisfy myself and without regard to traditional standards, to the needs of 

 publishers or to the tastes of the reading public. I will paint my portrait of 

 a size and colouring to please myself, and disregard at each stage circulation, 

 sale or profit. Biography is thankless work, but at least one can get delight in 

 writing it, if one writes exactly as one chooses and without regard to the 

 outside world ! In the process one will learn to know — as intimately as any 

 human being can know another — a personality not one's own; that is the joy 

 of spending years over a biography where there is a wealth of material 

 touching the mental output, the character and even the physical appearance 

 of the subject. 



If a work is to be printed, even twenty years after a man is dead some 

 things, some strong opinions and some names, must still be omitted. Our 

 lives are too closely entwined with those of others not to call for some 

 reticence even after two decades have elapsed. Still I think the reader will 

 find in these volumes a portrait of Galton which represents without undue 

 repression, and without uncritical adulation, the man as I knew him, and as 

 I have learnt from his writings and letters to interpret him. 



