1 8 FRANCIS GALTON 



account of a case in the Birmingham Hospital. 

 An injured drayman was brought in dead drunk, 

 and underwent amputation of the legs without any 

 signs of feeling pain. This set Galton wondering 

 whether patients might not with advantage be 

 made-drunk before operations — a query which was 

 to be happily answered by the discovery of anaes- 

 thetics. 



Another characteristic event was his attempt 

 to learn the properties of all the drugs in the 

 pharmacopoeia by personal experience. He deter- 

 mined to dose himself alphabetically, but got no 

 further than C, for the effects of croton oil put a 

 stop to his thirst for first-hand knowledge. 



We must pass over his time at King's College, 

 London, where, as he sat at lecture, he could see the 

 "sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on the 

 Thames," a vision which stirred his blood with a 

 longing for adventure, and which, as he character- 

 istically noticed, always occurred when the 

 weather-cock on the Horse Guards showed that 

 the south-west wind was blowing. 



We must, in like manner, skip his undergraduate 

 days at Trinity, Cambridge. We thus arrive by a 

 devious route at the period when he returned a 

 traveller and geographer of recognized merit, and 

 began the work with which he was practically 

 connected for many years, as a member of the 

 Meteorological Committee. His best-known con- 

 tribution in the science was in a paper read before 

 the Royal Society in 1862, where his discovery of 

 the anticyclone was first described ; but he also 

 had a good deal to do with the printing and publish- 



