FRANCIS GALTON 25 



plied : and it is to-day familiar nutriment, and is 

 now assiduously cultivated b}' the Eugenics Educa- 

 tion Society. But if Natural Inheritance, and 

 Hereditary Genius had not been WTitten ; if the 

 papers on eugenics had not appeared, and especially 

 if he had not convinced the world of his seriousness 

 by creating a eugenic foundation at University 

 College, where his friend Professor Karl Pearson 

 carries on the Galtonian traditions — ^why then the 

 paper in Macmillan would have counted for very 

 little. But it was not quite unnoticed. By my 

 father it is referred to in the Variation of Animals 

 and Plants under Domestication. Galton was 

 encouraged and reassured by Darwin's appreciation 

 of his work : his words in Hereditary Genius^ are, 

 "I feel assured that, inasmuch as what I then 

 wrote was sufficient to earn the acceptance of Mr. 

 — Darwin . . . the increased amount of evidence 

 submitted in the present volume is not likely to be 

 gainsaid." He was characteristically generous in 

 owning his debt to the author of the Origin of 

 Species, ^and characteristically modest in the value 

 he ascribed to my father's words. 



The book on Hereditary Genius strikes me as 

 most impressive. It seems as though the m^pwhom 

 the world had agreed to honour as an admirable and 

 indeed a brilliant worker in geography and meteor- 

 ology had suddenly grown big. He shows himself 

 to have the power of sustaining a weighty argument 

 in strong and temperate phrase, speaking as judge 

 rather than advocate, and to have definitely 



^ Hereditary Genius, p. 2. 



