Memories of My Life Francis Galton
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MEMORIES OF MY LIFE FRANCIS GALTON MEMORIES OF MY LIFE &- MEMORIES OF MY LIFE BY FRANCIS GALTON, F.R.S. OXF. D.C.L., ; HON. SC.D., CAMB. HON. FELLOW TRINITY COLL., CAMBRIDGE WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in igo8 PREFACE ~^HESE "Memories" are arranged under the -* subjects to which they refer, and only partially in chronological order. A copious list of my memoirs will be found in the Appendix with dates attached to them. These show what inquiries were going on at or about any specified year. The titles of books are printed in heavy letters. They summarise, as a rule, the best parts of the corresponding memoirs up to the dates of their publication. Nevertheless, a con- siderable quantity of matter remains in the memoirs as yet unused in that way. It has been a difficulty throughout to determine how much to insert and how much to omit. I have done my best, but fear I have failed through over- omission. The method of that most useful volume, the Index and Epitome of the Dictionary of the National Biography, has been adopted, of adding to each name the dates of birth and death. They serve for identification and for giving" a correct idea of the age of each man as compared with those with whom he was associated. The dates are mostly taken from the so the reader will find Dictionary , nearly always in that work a biography of the person in question. CONTENTS Itl CHAP. PAGE I. PARENTAGE ...... I II. CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD . .13 III. MEDICAL STUDIES . .22 IV. SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST . .48 V. CAMBRIDGE ...... 58 VI. EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN {map) . .83 VII. SYRIA ...... IOI VIII. HUNTING AND SHOOTING . IIO IX. SOUTH-WEST AFRICA (map) . .121 X. LANDS OF THE DAMARAS, OVAMPO, AND NAMAQUAS . 1 38 XI. AFTER RETURN HOME MARRIAGE . 1 52 XII. "ART OF TRAVEL" . .161 xiii. social life (medallions) . .169 XIV. GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA . 1 98 XV. BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 213 xvi. kew observatory and meteorology (meteoro- logical tracings) . .224 XVII. ANTHROPOMETRIC LABORATORIES . 244 XVIII. COMPOSITE PORTRAITS AND STEREOSCOPIC MAPS . 259 XIX. HUMAN FACULTY ..... 266 XX. HEREDITY ...... 287 xxi. race improvement (Galtonia Cayidicans) . 310 APPENDIX. BOOKS AND MEMOIRS BY THE AUTHOR . 325 1 PRINCIPAL AWARDS AND DEGREES . 33 INDEX ...... 332 3.3 SlU LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Portrait ...... Frontispiece From the Painting by C. W. Furse, A.R.A. Portrait ...... Facing p. 244 From a Photograph. IN THE TEXT PAGE Egypt and Syria . .88 Damaraland . .129 Yearly Medallions . .196 Meteorological Tracings ..... 237 Galtonia Candicans ..... 323 vm MEMORIES OF MY LIFE CHAPTER I PARENTAGE Lunar Birthplace Grandparents Dr. Erasmus Darwin Society- Captain Barclay Allardice Mrs. Schimmelpenninck " UST before the arrival of the letter in which my asked me to write the memories J publisher of I to be my life, happened reading Shakespeare's Henry IV. and laughing over Falstaffs soliloquy after the gross exaggerations by Justice Shallow of his own It the youthful performances. contained sentence, " Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this " vice of lying ! Feeling the truth of his ejaculation, I headed the first page of my memorandum-book with those words as a warning, knowing how difficult it is to be veracious about long-past events, threads of imagination insinuating themselves among those supplied by memory and becoming indistinguishable from them. Many old notebooks and letters are, however, in which have me but two my possession helped ; my latest surviving sisters, whose minds were sure store- houses of family events, and to whom I always referred whenever I wanted a date or particulars of a long-past fact, are now both dead, the one at the 2 MJSMUJilJSS Ul MY L.1JJJS age of ninety-three and the other at ninety-seven, each with a clear and vigorous mind to nearly the very end of her life. I have hardly any contempor- ary friends left who could aid in recalling the circum- stances of my childhood and boyhood. With rare exceptions, "All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." I was born on February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, with which town my father Samuel Tertius, my grandfather Samuel John, and my great-grandfather Samuel Galton, were all closely connected. Different members of the family had resided or were resident at various points beyond the circumference of the town, in houses then amidst green fields, but now overspread beyond recognition by its hideous outskirts. My grandfather's place was at Duddeston, then " commonly written Dudson." Its gardens had been charmingly laid out by my great-grandfather and improved by my grandfather. The house, which was once a centre of refined entertainment, gradually lost its charm of isolation later it ceased ; on, wholly to be attractive as a residence. It was then leased by my father to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, because, as he remarked, no one in his senses would live in it. It is now turned into St. Anne's School, with its porticoes and other outer adornments shorn off, and with its once beautiful gardens changed into the sites of railway sidings and gasworks. I re- member it distinctly in its beauty in the year 1830, which was two years before my grandfather's death. The Larches, where I was born, had some three acres of garden and field attached to it, with other fields it was a for child- beyond ; paradise my PARENTAGE 3 hood. Its site is now covered with small houses. The two fine larches that flanked it gave me a love for that tree, which persists and is still recognisably associated with its origin. My six nearest progenitors, namely the two parents and four grandparents, were markedly different in temperament and tastes, and they have be- queathed very different combinations of them to their descendants. I can only partly touch on these. Galton My grandfather, Samuel John (1 753 statistical of business. 1832), was a scientific and man He was a Fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose members met at one another's houses on the day and night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select as to include Priestley, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Keir the chemist, Withering the botanist, Watt, and Boulton. Full are to be in particulars of the Lunar Society found Smiles' Life of Boulton, and elsewhere. I may mention that the late Sir Rowland Hill, of penny-postage fame, told me that the event which first gave him a taste for science was the present of a small electrical machine-made to him when a boy, by my grandfather. Samuel John Galton was very fond of animals. He kept many bloodhounds; he loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in three small volumes, with illustrations. He had a decidedly statistical bent, loving to arrange all kinds of data in parallel lines of corresponding lengths, and frequently using colour for distinction. My father, and others of Samuel John Galton's children, taste in a or less it rose inherited this greater degree ; 4 MEMORIES OE MY LIEE to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on that account, as the number of ex- pensively bound volumes that she ordered from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and have it still the rest were ; destroyed. She must have collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red, and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason, but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that endeared her to her nephews and nieces. Samuel John Galton was a successful man of business. He was a manufacturer, and became a contractor on a large scale for the supply of muskets to the army during the great war. Birmingham offered at that time a good field for the business of a contractor, because its manufactories were many and of moderate size, and central organisations were wanting. The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for steam-engines were almost the only large works at that time. My grandfather prospered in his business as a "Captain of Industry," to use the phrase applied to him in a book treating of Birmingham. He founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually brought to a close some few years after the war had PARENTAGE 5 ceased. He died in 1832, leaving a fortune of some ,12,000 a year, of which about a quarter went to each of his three sons, of whom my father was the eldest, and the rest between his three daughters. The Galton family had been Quakers for many generations. They came to Birmingham from Somersetshire, in the time of my great-grandfather, of its earlier Samuel Galton (1 720-1 799). Some members are buried at Yatton. There is a hamlet in Dorsetshire called Galton, adjacent to Owre Moigne, with which one at least of our name, and apparently a far back relative, was connected many generations ago. My grandmother Galton (1757-18 17) was also of Quaker stock, being daughter of Robert Barclay of Ury, a descendant of Robert Barclay (1648- 1690) " the Apologist," as he used to be named from his work, Barclay's Apology, which, to quote the Dictionary of National Biography, is the standard exposition of the tenets of his sect, of which the essential principle is that "all true knowledge comes from divine revelation to the heart of the individual." My grandmother's half-brother, Robert Barclay Allardice (1779-1854), commonly known as "Captain Barclay," was a noted athlete and pedestrian, and in later years an active agriculturist.