126 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



well painted buttons were thereby created. The rule of three seemed to show that if so much 

 could be done with three strokes what an enormous amount of skilled work must go to the 

 painting of a portrait which required 20,000 of them. At the same time, it made me wonder 

 whether painters had mastered the art of getting the maximum result from their labour. I make 

 this remark as a confessed Philistine. Anyhow I hope that future sitters will beguile their 

 tedium in the same way that I did, and tell the results*." 



Committee for the Measurement of Plants and Animals. It is impossible 

 to pass over in Galton's Life the last decade of the nineteenth century without 

 some reference to this Committee; it took up too much of Galton's energies 

 and consumed too much of his valuable time to remain without some notice 

 in his biography. But the time has hardly yet arrived, when it is possible to 

 write fully about it, and cite at length the voluminous letters and other 

 documents which indicate the parts played by various individuals in first 

 hindering and then entirely perverting the original purposes of the Com- 

 mittee. 



The Committee was appointed at Galton's suggestion by the Royal Society 

 Council on January 18, 1894, and consisted of Francis Galton (Chairman), 

 Francis Darwin and Professors Macalister, Meldola, Poulton and Weldon 

 (Secretary), with the very definite purpose of "conducting Statistical Inquiries 

 into the Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals." The first report 

 was made in 1896, and consisted of a detailed account of Weldon's measure- 

 ments on Carcinus mosnas, and also his "Remarks on Variation in Animals 

 and Plants f." In the latter paper Weldon emphasised his own view that 

 while "sports" in certain exceptional cases may contribute to evolution, 

 ordinary "continuous" variations were a more probable source of change and 

 further stated, what is almost self-evident, that "the questions raised by the 

 Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method is the 

 only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally 

 checked." In asserting this he was only saying that heredity and selection 

 in Nature are mass phenomena and must be treated as such. To those who 

 have read the earlier pages of this chapter, it will be clear that Weldon's 

 view as to the relatively small importance for evolution of "sports" was 

 opposed to Galton's, but this divergence of opinion by no means caused 

 friction between the Chairman and the Secretary of the Committee. It did, 

 however, call forth reams of criticism and numerous letters of protest from 

 William Bateson to the Chairman. The only addition to the Committee in 

 1896 was, however, that of the present biographer. That Weldon's paper 

 admitted of criticism not only from the biological, but from the statistical 

 side must be allowed, but the fatal mistake was the old one, the evil of 

 attempting to work through a Committee. Had Weldon's paper been published 



* Would the result be that many subjects would have the strained look of those practising 

 mental arithmetic? The late Mr Hope Pinker told me that he was once modelling a bust of Jowett. 

 The Master remained stolidly silent ; Pinker found his task hopeless, and told Jowett that he 

 must throw up his commission, unless the Master consented to talk. " I will try to be good, 

 I will try," replied Jowett, and the portrait was completed. It is not always the artist's fault, 

 if sittings end in a failure. 



f See Roy. Soc. Proc. Vol. lvii, pp. 360-382. 



