350 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



to the mark of a Eug. Lab. publication. If you think it to be on the border line and would 

 send it to me, I would do my best to give a easting vote. I should be quite prepared to exact 

 a revision of the paper in accordance with your suggestions to him, before taking it into con- 

 sideration at all. He might be told this definitely. 



I fear that Mrs Gotto may have bothered you about speaking to-morrow. Please absolve me 

 from the charge of having incited her. — Quite the contrary, I have insisted that you must not 

 be troubled, but for all that I believe she has been irrepressible in her zeal. 



Affectionately yours, Francis Galton. 



42, Rutland Gate, S.W. Oct. 15, 1908. 



My dear Karl Pearson, I have read F.'s memoir and return it with a few remarks, 

 which you can if you like send to him. What you said last night was excellent, and very help- 

 ful to the Society, as showing what valuable work they might do as collectors of facts, and 

 organisers of local inquiry into family histories. I wholly go with you there. 



Affectionately yours, Francis Galton. 



Galton's paper, to which reference is made in the preceding letters, was 

 read before the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries on 

 October 14, by the author himself. It was, I think, the last time I heard 

 him address an audience, but he spoke clearly and well, and seemed less 

 fatigued than at the Darwin- Wallace celebration. The paper is entitled 

 " Local Associations for Promoting Eugenics," and was printed in the issue 

 of Nature, Oct 22, 1908* 



Galton begins by stating that he only proposes to consider what steps can 

 be taken by local associations in the large field of positive Eugenics, namely 

 in favouring those especially fit for citizenship ; for the time being he put on 

 one side the topic of restricting the production of undesirables, which has 

 been sometimes termed negative Eugenicsf. The problem before Galton was 

 the nature of the furtherance of Eugenics that local associations more or less 

 affiliated to the Education Society could provide. He writes : 



"It is difficult, while explaining what I have in view, to steer a course that shall keep clear 

 of the mud flats of platitude on the one hand, and not come to grief against the rocks of over- 

 precision on the other. There is no clear issue out of mere platitudes, while there is great danger 

 in entering into details. A good scheme may be entirely compromised merely on account of 

 public opinion not being ripe to receive it in the proposed form, or through a flaw discovered 

 in some non-essential part of it. Experience shows that the safest course in a new undertaking 

 is to proceed warily and tentatively towards the desired end, rather than freely and rashly 

 along a predetermined route, however carefully it may have been elaborated on paper. 



" Again, whatever scheme of action is proposed for adoption must be neither Utopian nor 

 extravagant, but accordant throughout with British sentiment and practice. 



• Vol. lxxviii, pp. 645-647. 



t The term is not very satisfactory. " A-eugenics " is worse, " Cacogenics " is cacophonous, 

 dys-genics should I fear be dys-eugenics, for it would signify without the "eu," I take it, absence 

 of any generation, whereas it is to represent that branch of our subject which studies what may 

 control misbreeding in man. Further the word used must be such that the study of cures for 

 misbreeding is not confused with the practice. For example, what is the opposite of a eugenic 

 marriage, i.e. one approved by the principles of Eugenics? If it be an "a-eugenic" marriage, 

 then " a-eugenics " sounds rather like the practice of misbreeding, than the body of principles 

 which we propound to minimise it. Galton in this paper uses the term "anti-eugenic" for an unde- 

 sirable mating — the word is correctly formed, but " anti-eugenics " might signify propagandism 

 against the principles of eugenics rather than the study of the causes making for anti-eugenic 

 matings, or the factors which might minimise them. 



