Walte?- Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860— 190G. 
45 
And again : 
"It makes me more than ever glad I am coming back to Gower Street where there are live 
people to talk to ! Surely thirty people* i.s a great many. Try talking for five years to 
an audience of from three to nine, and see how the thought of thirty will cheer you ! And none 
of these excellent folk are sent by their tutors ! " [Oxford, 7/11/04.] 
The letters of Weldon to both Francis Galton and myself during the years 
1904 and 1905 are full of inheritance work, the details of the great mice-breeding 
experiment, the statement and the solution, or it might be the suggested solution, 
of nuclear problems leading to determinantal theories of inheritance. Occasionally 
there would be a touch of conscience, and the drawings for the Crustacea would 
be pressed forward : 
"I ought to give my whole time to the Cambridge Natural History for a while. They have 
been very good to me, and I have treated them more than a little badly. I am rather anxious to 
get them off my conscience." [Oxford, 15/2/05.] 
But only the chapter on Phyllopods got completed, figures and all, and set up. 
Many figures were prepared for other parts ; beautiful things, which gave Weldon 
not only scientific but artistic pleasure, he had made, but the text remains the 
veriest fragment. In the same way but little was absolutely completed of tlie 
article on Heliozoa for Lankester's Natural History. It was not Weldon's 
biometric friends that kept him from these tasks, it was solely his own intense keen- 
ness in the pursuit of new knowledge. It was occasionally with a feeling of great 
responsibility that the present writer would propound to him an unsolved pioblem 
with which he might himself be struggling. There was absolute certainty that if 
the problem was at all an exciting one, Weldon would leave his scent and follow 
the new trail with his whole keenness and at full speed. All else would be put on 
one side, and he could only be recalled to natural history or biometrics by an 
appeal to his conscience. Like Sandro, the chase must be completed before he 
returned to the humdrum trot behind a cycle on the highwa}^ 
The fascination of inheritance problems kept Weldon, however, for mouths at a 
time at the Heredity Book. At Easter, 1905, he went to Ferraraf, because that 
place had a university, and as such must have a library, where work could be done. 
The contents of the library were perfectly mediaeval, a characteristic appropriate 
in the castle, but hardly helpful in heredityj. Still, portions of the manuscript 
came to England for comment and criticism, and we were hopeful that the end of 
the year would see the book completed. 
* The number I already knew would certainly attend. 
t "The town is worth a lot, and the fields are full of a little speedwell, which varies most delightfully. 
I have so far resisted the temptation to chuck the wretched book and tabulate the variations of its 
flowers, and I hope I shall do to the end. But it is a temptation I feel out of the world, an 
absolute blank, with only a slight interest in newts' tails and an even slighter in a statue of Savonarola 
which looks at me all day through the window." [Ferrara, 3/4/05.] 
X From Ferrara came back if not the speedwells, masses of silkworms' eggs of different local races, 
but providentially they failed to hatch out in suiiicient numbers owing to the May frosts and no 
new scent took Weldon off the book and the mice during the summer. 
