100 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



achievements or for those of their progeny, others less famous. The service 

 lists of the former were always full up with external and home mares ; this 

 could not be said of the latter. I think it would be safe to say that the 

 former stallions served annually at least double the number of mares the 

 latter did. I hold therefore that to really demonstrate even a relative 

 superiority in producing standard performers Galton ought to have taken 

 the number of standard performers per total foals produced and this for 

 both sire and dam. Owing to one cause or another one mare may fail more 

 frequently than another to produce her annual foal. Out of four viable foals 

 she might produce three standard performers. Galton's method would make 

 her a less exceptional mare than one that produced four standard performers 

 out of ten foals. Thus his conclusions may be correct, but they cannot be 

 said to be proven until we know the relation of exceptional to total offspring. 

 The distribution of standard performers to sires looks like a "./"-shaped 

 frequency curve, and I do not understand why it is not as justifiable as 

 a ./-shaped curve for cricket scores, nor do I believe that anything is 

 deducible from the deviation of its tail from normality*. 



Foundation of '" Biometrika." In October 1900 the present biographer sent 

 in a paper to the Royal Society ; that paper was printed in the Philosophical 

 Transactions and was published in November of the folloiving year. Mean- 

 while William Bateson, who had read the paper as one of the referees, wrote 

 a sharp criticism of it, which the then Secretary of the Royal Society printed 

 and issued in slip to the Fellows, before the latter had any opportunity of 

 studying the criticised paper itselff. Michael Foster, notwithstanding the 

 remonstrances of the biometricians, failed to see any objection to a referee 

 criticising a paper before its publication, and as a result of his attitude, it was 

 determined early in 1901 to found a Journal for the publication of biometric 

 papers. Weldon and the biographer were to be Acting Editors with Galton 

 as Consulting Editor. It is all past history now, and with twenty volumes 

 issued of Biometrika, one can afford to smile, when one thinks of Bateson 

 and Michael Foster as unwitting parents of what they would have considered 

 an unviable hybrid! Biometrika appeared in October 1901, and Galton 

 contributed an introductory notice entitled "Biometry" (Vol. I, pp. 7-10). 

 A good deal of that paper would now be unintelligible without the light 



* There is a long review in the same number of Nature (Vol. lviii, pp. 2-11-2) by Galton 

 of Alexander Sutherland's The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct. Galton praises 

 the book highly, as extremely original and extending and confirming the masterly sketch by 

 Darwin in Chapters iv and v of his Descent of Man of the evolution of the moral instinct. 

 Galton does not, however, contribute any special views of his own, except the remark that "it 

 would be very interesting to trace and describe the origin and purport of superstitious fears in 

 human nature and their bearing on moral instinct." Galton, it must be remembered, was always 

 appreciative and generous in reviewing ; there is, even allowing for this, much information 

 collected in Sutherland's book, which should give it a permanent place in the evolutionist's 

 library. 



f Shortly afterwards a resolution of the Council was conveyed to me, requesting that in 

 future papers mathematics should be kept apart from biological applications. /3ios was an 

 admissible topic, fxirpov also, but their combination was anathema, and that at a time when statis- 

 tical theory had to be worked out step by step as the biological applications demanded. 



