FRANCIS GALTON 17 



teaching he received. "Grammar," he says, "and 

 the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhor- 

 rent to me, for there seemed so little sense in them." 

 He suffered in fact like his cousin, Charles Darwin, 

 who groaned over the classics at Shrewsbury 

 School, and forgot what he learned, even to some 

 of the Greek letters, by the time he was nineteen. 



In 1838, when Galton was sixteen years of age, 

 he became an indoor pupil at the Birmingham 

 General Hospital. Here the education was at any 

 rate practical enough, and to this coddled genera- 

 tion it sounds a rough introduction to medicine. He 

 had to prepare tinctures, extracts, decoctions, and 

 learned to make pills by hand — a slow enough 

 process. In later life, when he saw a pill-making 

 machine at work, it must have been his boyish 

 memories which inspired the characteristic calcula- 

 tion that if a grandmotherly Government possessed 

 forty-five of these engines, it could supply each 

 inhabitant of the British Isles with one pill per 

 diem. 



It was in the surgery that he had most experi- 

 ence ; he and the other indoor pupils were called 

 up at all hours to dress burns, to patch broken 

 heads, and reduce dislocations, with, as it seems, 

 very little instruction. It was doubtless a fine bit 

 of education in self-reliance, and he must have 

 learned much that was of use in his South African 

 travels. Whether as a student of method he 

 approved of his rough and ready education is not 

 quite clear. His genius for experiment, or rather 

 that priceless capacity for extracting unexpected 

 conclusions from experience, comes out in his 



