FRANCIS GALTON 21 



There was also a characteristic experiment or 

 inquiry into the intensity of boredom in a lecture 

 audience, by counting the number of fidgets per 

 man per minute. In this case to avoid the open 

 use of a watch, he estimated time by the number 

 of his own breaths, "of which there are fifteen in a 

 minute." I hope my brother ^ will forgive my 

 adding that he found the Royal Geographical 

 Society meetings good hunting-ground for fidgets, 

 for as Francis Galton remarks, "Even there, dull 

 memoirs are occasionally read." 



Nor must I forget his plan of marking, by 

 means of a hidden apparatus, the beauty of the 

 women he met in the streets of different towns. 

 He classified them as pretty, ugly, and indifferent; 

 in this beauty competition London came out at 

 the top ; Aberdeen, I regret to say, was at the 

 bottom. 



But in considering the measurement of human 

 faculty we have got quite out of any reasonably 

 chronological sequence, for the book bearing that 

 title appeared in 1883. But the estimation of 

 human characteristics, especially in relation to 

 heredity, was in Galton 's mind several 3-ears earlier, 

 and in 1865 he wrote the two papers in Macmillan's 

 Magazine which contain the germs of his later work 

 on heredity and eugenics. It is unfortunate that 

 the research on heredity, together with its practical 

 application to human welfare in the new science of 

 eugenics, should not have more space given to it 

 in his autobiographical Memories ; there are but 



^ Major L. Darwin had been President of the Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society. 



