228 



Life mid Letters of Francis Galton 



He thus obtains the following distribution for 10,000 individuals of any 

 character in a nation : 



The letters below mark the particular classes for purposes of reference, 

 the small letters denoting classes with the corresponding range of defect 

 of talents below mediocrity and the capital letters the classes with excess 

 of talents above mediocrity. The reader will note that with a different 

 nomenclature the distribution is one very familiar to statisticians. Beyond 

 V and v Galton supposes classes W, X, etc., w, x, etc., each corresponding to 

 a range of one talent. He illustrates this scheme from his own data for male 

 stature where the mean was 5' 8", the "talent" If" nearly, and where 

 accordingly class U would contain men over 6' l£", "quite tall enough to 

 overlook a hatless mob." Then he continues : 



" So the civic worth (however the term may be defined) of {/-class men, and still more of 

 K-class, are notably superior to the crowd ; though they are far below the heroic order." 

 (p. 526.) 



In round numbers about one man in 300 belongs to the F-class. 



In the next place Galton proceeds to compare his normal distribution scale 

 with the classes A, B,...H, into which Mr Charles Booth divided the 

 population of London in his noteworthy survey. He concludes that Mr 

 Booth's class H corresponds to his own T, U, V and above. Further, his own 

 t, u, v and below correspond to Mr Booth's class A, criminals, semi-criminals, 

 loafers, and a few others, and to his class B, very poor persons who subsist on 

 casual earnings, many of whom are inevitably poor from shiftlessness, idleness 

 or drink. Galton rightly considers that, from the standpoint of civic worth, 

 classes t, u, v and below are undesirables. 



The next section of the lecture is entitled Worth of Cliildren. The lecturer 

 points out that the brains of the nation lie in the W- and .X-classes, and if the 

 people, who would be placed in them as adults, could be distinguished as 

 children, were procurable by money, and could be reared as Englishmen, 

 it would be a cheap bargain for the nation to buy them at the rate of several 

 hundreds or even thousands of pounds per head. He refers to Dr Farr's 

 estimate of the value of the baby of an Essex* labourer's wife at £5 and says 

 he believes that on the same actuarial principles an X-class baby might be 

 reckoned in thousands of pounds. While some such "talented" folk fail, 

 most succeed and many succeed greatly: 



* Dr Farr's analysis seems based on the wages of agricultural labourers in Norfolk, not 

 Essex : see Journal of R. Statistical Society, Vol. xvi, pp. 38—44. 



