404 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



proposed course, and return to the point from which they started, thus really 

 walking in a circuit or making a complete revolution. He cites the actual 

 experience of a young friend who in a walk of 2\ miles actually came 

 back unconsciously to her starting point. It was a problem to delight 

 Galton — he reckons it all out and concludes that in 7\ paces she turned on 

 the average through half a degree — which is roughly about 4' of angle in a 

 single pace, an amount quite inappreciable by ordinary observation*. Then 

 we have the long experience of a sagacious old man : 



" So it is with public opinion. It may be slow to deflect, but if deflected gently and con- 

 tinuously in the same direction by reasonable advocacy, it may be ultimately turned quite round 



by that agency alone For although, if watched for a short time only, public opinion appears 



to be stable, few things are more unstable in the long run." (p. 149.) 



Thus Galton would have his disciples turn public opinion in favour of 

 Eugenics. And bearing his caution in mind, his biographer thinks always 

 of the Odenwald, and gives Mrs Grundy a mild 0. B. cannon — a friendly but 

 persistent shove in the ribs at every third pace. 



It was a grave misfortune that in this, the final year of his life, Galton 

 should have been drawm into three controversies which sadly interfered with 

 the last piece of work he had in hand. 



The first attack came from a member of the Eugenics Education Society 

 against the investigations which the Eugenics Laboratory had been making 

 on the influences of order of birth on health and longevity. Now let us suppose 

 those researches were wholly erroneous — which I do not admit — then the 

 fitting way to criticise them was to show that they were statistically in error. 

 Instead of that we were treated to an outpouring of turgid rhetoric — " The 

 biometricians — so called, one fancies, because they measure everything but 

 life " — " Things like that are trifles in biometrics, where anything may happen. 

 The point I wish to make is that statements about the first-born can mean 

 nothing, and investigations can discover nothing, until we abandon this 

 preposterous worship of Number as Number — in which our Neo-Pythagoreans 

 remind one of nothing more than the superstitions of the seventh son of a 

 seventh son " — " I am not concerned here to defend the House of Lords, nor 

 primogeniture in any of its forms, but I am concerned to protest against the 

 tendency to identify the divine cause of eugenics or race-culture with these 

 mathematical divinations," and so onf. 



* I may be permitted, perhaps, to cite my memories of a similar case in relation to Oscar 

 Browning, a well known character of my Cambridge days. While I was in Heidelberg 

 studying after my Cambridge career, O. B. came there for a week-end in a very hot July, and 

 we arranged on the Sunday to take a walk in the Odenwald, lunching about one o'clock at 

 X. (I forget its actual name). The day was so hot that we determined to leave the road and 

 walk in the same direction through the forest itself. Now those who knew O. B. will remember 

 that when walking with him he cannoned against you at every third pace. As a result of this 

 slight but persistent series of impacts, we emerged at 12.30 on to the high road again, moving in 

 the right direction — not at X., but a few yards behind where we had first entered the forest. 

 We returned to Heidelberg for lunch. 



t Dr C. W. Saleeby in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 10, 1910, but there was much of the same 

 character elsewhere also. 



