136 



Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



Appendix to Chapter XIV*. 



"The Weights of British Noblemen during the last Three Generations," 

 Nature, January 17, 1884 (Vol. xxix, pp. 266-268). 



This rather amusing paper is not included in any list of Galton's 

 memoirs known to me, nor were any offprints of it to be found in the 

 Galtoniana. It seems to have been forgotten by Galton himself and would 

 have certainly been overlooked by me had I not stumbled across it in 

 reading Komanes' review of Galton's Record of Family Faculties and Life 

 History Album in the same number of the Journal. Galton — whom the 

 Goddess of Chance certainly favoured — became acquainted with the fact 

 that an old established firm of wine and coffee merchants had been since 

 about 1750 in the habit of weighing their customers, and that upwards of 

 20,000 persons, many of whom were famous in English history of the 

 eighteenth century, had for their use or amusement sought the firm's huge 



GALTON'S SMOOTHED CURVES FOR AGE -WEIGHT OF BRITISH 



NOBLEMEN IN THREE SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS. 

 190 



180 - 



i 



c©0 



£ 170 



160 



beam scales. Galton confined his attention almost entirely to noblemen as a 

 well-rounded class, whose ages were easily ascertainable, and to their data 

 in respect only of two characteristics, namely the degree of fluctuation in 

 weight as exhibited by the age- weight curves of individual noblemen, and 

 the difference in the average age-weight curves of noblemen born in the 

 three periods 1740-1769, 1770-1799, 1800-1829. He found that the average 

 annual fluctuation in the earlier group was about 7 lbs. and that in the 

 latest group it was only 5 lbs. He concluded that this pointed to an 



* Some notice of the following paper should have appeared in Section H of Chapter xm 

 (Vol. n), but its existence was then unknown to me. 



