Francis Gallon 1 



A GREAT personality has passed from us in the death of 

 Francis Gal ton. To few has it been given to live so full and 

 so valuable a life. The Goddess Fortune, it is true, offered 

 him opportunity with a generous hand ; rarely, however, 

 has an offer been more amply justified than that she made 

 to Francis Galton, for the treasure has been invested by 

 its trustee in safe things, which will never cease to pay. 

 Galton never flew too high nor attempted to probe too deep ; 

 he was conscious both of the extent and of the limitation of 

 his powers ; his work is of lasting value to mankind because 

 he possessed in a high degree that sense which tells its owner 

 which tasks lie within and which beyond his power. 



But we should be disloyal to Galton if we regarded him 

 as an isolated personality detached from his natural setting 

 his ancestry. Indeed, we are not truly loyal to what he 

 believed unless we regard the individual as a product (in 

 the strictly literal sense of a continuation without cessation 

 of individuality) of his ancestors, and intelligible only in the 

 light of a knowledge of those ancestors. Turgenev and 

 Samuel Butler owe their supreme position as novelists to the 

 fact that they perceived this. 



Perhaps the most remarkable instance of a monopoly 

 possessed by a single family over a particular business is 

 the limitation to the Darwin family of the business of bring- 

 ing home the truth of evolution to the understanding of 

 mankind. We make no apology for the term business. It 

 is no longer necessary to point out that Charles Darwin's 

 achievement was not to discover evolution, but the much 



1 Obituary notice in Science Progress, 1911. 

 S* 28l 



