338 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



of memories and associations, which enables us to see the picture before us. 

 Take one of Galton's quotations : 



" One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 

 You seem'd to hear them climb and fall 

 And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 

 Beneath the windy wall." 



All the adjectives are used in figurative senses, and the beauty of the 

 passage lies not in the use of clear and narrowly defined terms, but in the 

 atmospheres which experience and usage have attached to the words in 

 the memory of the reader. It is precisely these atmospheres which form 

 the staple of the poet's craft. They are a grave danger to the scientist, and he 

 strives to meet them by coining new words with stringently limited meaning, 

 or, less advantageously, using old ones in a new, narrowly defined sense. 

 Every time a really great poet uses a word he enlarges its atmosphere, while 

 the object of the scientist is — at any rate for the time being — to circumscribe 

 a word's atmosphere ; he can often achieve his end by adopting little used 

 words*. I would not weaken by a jot Galton's criticism of bad grammar, 

 careless writing, or sheer pedantry in terminology, only I do not believe it 

 feasible to write scientific memoirs with simple English words like Tennyson 

 used in his Palace of Art. As an editor and teacher I agree with Galton 

 that 



"The preliminary culture of students of science seems usually to have been very imperfect"; 



and again : 



" The comparative rarity among the English of a keen sense of the difference between good 

 and bad literary style is a great obstacle to the reform I desire. It is especially noticeable 

 among the younger scientific men, whose education has been over-specialised and little con- 

 cerned with the ' Humanities.' The literary sense is far more developed in France, where a 

 slovenly paper ranks with a disorderly dress as a sign of low breeding." (pp. 5-6.) 



I would have every postgraduate training in a laboratory for research 

 write at least a monthly essay on a topic bearing on his branch of science. 

 Yet grant all this, and still I feel that it was not only the "slovenly papers " 

 which agitated Galton. Unconsciously behind it was the importance he felt 

 of keeping abreast with the half-dozen branches of knowledge, in the early 

 nurture of which he had taken part. His paper is the swan's song of the last 

 of the great Victorian leaders in science. In his youth he had followed and 

 contributed to the early growth of Anthropology, Meteorology, Evolutionary 

 Biology, Genetics, the Theory of Statistics, and Psychology ; but these sciences 

 had outgrown their infancy, had become highly specialised, and teemed with 

 new terms with which he could not keep in touch. It would have been a very 



freat task for a younger man ; for the octogenarian, however outstanding 

 is intellect, the task was impossible. Galton was, perhaps, over-inclined to 

 attribute this incapacity to follow, as he longed to do, all new developments 

 in half-a-dozen sciences to the obscure use of language or to the introduction 



* Thus "conjugation" is a better word than "mating"; "dominance" than "mastery"; 

 " probability " than " chance "; " evolution " than " unrolling "—the simple English words before 

 scientific adoption would have too wide customary atmospheres. 



