FRANCIS GALTON 35 



thing that this Society should have had Francis 

 Galton for its Honorary President. It entitles us to 

 feel assured that in following the line of action 

 marked out for ourselves we are on the right track, 

 and that in the difficult pioneer work of helping the 

 English public to realise the deadly need of eugenic 

 reform we are following in Galton 's steps. We 

 are also so fortunate as to have received en- 

 couragement and help at the hands of some of the 

 leaders in the science of heredity, Weismann, Yves 

 Delage, Ray Lankester, the late Adam Sedgwick, 

 Poulton, Bateson, and others. 



Galton says somewhere^ that great men have 

 long boyhoods. This was certainly true of him, 

 though I should rather describe as youthful the 

 delightful qualities that never faded out of his 

 nature. It is, I believe, the correct thing to speak 

 of the "golden dreams of youth," and if by this 

 hackneyed phrase we mean a keenly imaginative 

 outlook, a hopefulness with a certain dash about it, 

 a generous courage — tinged with romance — then 

 Francis Galton had undying youth. And this 

 makes his seriously measured progress in eugenics 

 all the more worthy of our admiration. 



In one of the Macmillan articles he wrote : 

 "Many plan for that which they can never live 

 to see. At the hour of death they are still 

 planning." 



It was thus that Francis Galton died, and as 

 year after year we meet together on February i6th, 

 let us think of him and his plannings with affection 

 and respect. 



^ Macmillan's Magazine, xil., p. 326. 



