Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History. Sir Francis Darwin
the former, and loved the latter.”
Have we not here an early appreciation of method, or must we merely class the memory with the scene in “Great Expectations,” where the terrifying elder sister, Mrs. Joe, prepares bread and butter for her husband and for Pip (her little brother) in an eminently just and disagreeable manner. May I be allowed to add that a love of butter in the big holes is not hereditary in all branches of the family; I should have loved the sister who picked it out.
At a later stage in his boyhood Galton transferred his study of method from his sisters to his schoolmasters. He describes what he suffered from the absurd limitations (which still exist) in the education of English boys, and chafed at the teaching he received. “Grammar,” he says, “and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for there seemed so little sense in them.” He suffered in fact like his cousin, Charles Darwin, who groaned over the classics at Shrewsbury School, and forgot what he learned, even to some of the Greek letters, by the time he was nineteen.
In 1838, when Galton was sixteen years of age, he became an indoor pupil at the Birmingham General Hospital. Here the education was at any rate practical enough, and to this coddled generation it sounds a rough introduction to medicine. He had to prepare tinctures, extracts, decoctions, and learned to make pills by hand—a slow enough process. In later life, when he saw a pill-making machine at work, it must have been his boyish memories which inspired the characteristic calculation that if a grandmotherly Government possessed forty-five of these engines, it could supply each inhabitant of the British Isles with one pill per diem.
It was in the surgery that he had most experience; he and the other indoor pupils were called up at all hours to dress burns, to patch broken heads, and reduce dislocations, with, as it seems, very little instruction. It was doubtless a fine bit of education in self-reliance, and he must have learned much that was of use in his South African travels. Whether as a student of method he approved of his rough and ready education is not quite clear. His genius for experiment, or rather that priceless capacity for extracting unexpected conclusions from experience, comes out in his 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 anæsthetics.
Another characteristic event was his attempt to learn the properties of all the drugs in the pharmacopœia by personal experience. He determined 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 characteristically 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 contribution 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 publishing of the now familiar weather charts. Meteorology takes us from 1861 to 1863, that is nearly to 1865, when his first paper on heredity appeared, which was at the same time his first paper on hereditary genius. This line of research was to form his chief claim to celebrity and must be separately treated.
Meanwhile I wish to say something of his love of experiment, which is a branch of his devotion to method. We know something of the more entertaining of his inquiries from his delightful book of Memories, yet I cannot but fear that he has left out many experiments even stranger than those he publishes. My father had a special affection for what in his own case he called “Fool’s experiments.” These are what, I am afraid, Galton may have omitted. Still there are records of some delightful lines of work. He is probably the only man who ever attempted to solve by experiment the problem of free will and determinism. He limited his inquiry to the question—whether there exists in human affairs such a thing as an “uncaused and creative action.” The experiment, or rather self-observation, was carried on (1879) for six weeks, almost continuously, and “off and on for many subsequent months.” He found that with practice he could nearly always trace the “straightforward causation” of a given action, which at first seemed to have been performed “through a creative act, or by inspiration.”
Then there was his attempt to experience the feelings of the insane. “The method tried was to invest everything I met, whether human, animal, or inanimate, with the imaginary attributes of a spy.” The trial was only too successful; by the time he had walked 1½ miles to the cab-stand at the east end of the Green Park “every horse in the stand seemed watching” him, “either with pricked ears, or disguising its espionage.” He adds that hours passed before this uncanny sensation wore off. On another occasion he managed to create in his mind the feelings of a savage for his idol, the idol in his own case being a picture of Mr. Punch.
These experiments seem to me very characteristic of the man in their originality, their humour, and their unexpected measure of success, for personally, I should have prophesied failure in all. They have a special bearing on Galton’s belief that a quasi-religious enthusiasm for eugenics may be built up. I have sometimes wondered that he should believe this great change so feasible, but I understand how he came to think so when I read of his strange power of impressing beliefs on himself, with such force as to leave a trail of discomfort in the mind after the make-believe had ceased.
These and similar trials were, I think, made in relation to his desire to weigh and measure human faculty in a broad sense. I remember his telling me of his experiments on the mind of the British cabman. His method was to use alternately two different forms of the address to which he wished to go. Thus on Monday he would tell the man to drive him home to 42, Rutland Gate, on Tuesday he would say, “Rutland Gate, 42,” and so on. My recollection is that the cabmen understood more quickly the familiar formula in which the number precedes the name of the street.
There was also a characteristic experiment or inquiry into the intensity of boredom in a lecture audience, by counting the number of fidgets per man per minute. In this case to avoid the open use of a watch, he estimated time by the number of his own breaths, “of which there are fifteen in a minute.” I hope my brother [21] will forgive my adding that he found the Royal Geographical Society meetings good hunting-ground for fidgets, for as Francis Galton remarks, “Even there, dull memoirs are occasionally read.”
Nor must I forget his plan of marking, by means of a hidden apparatus, the beauty of the women he met in the streets of different towns. He classified them as pretty, ugly, and indifferent; in this beauty competition London came out at the top; Aberdeen, I regret to say, was at the bottom.
But in considering the measurement of human faculty we have got quite out of any reasonably chronological sequence, for the book bearing that title appeared in 1883. But the estimation of human characteristics, especially in relation to heredity, was in Galton’s mind several years earlier, and in 1865 he wrote the two papers in Macmillan’s Magazine which contain the germs of his later work on heredity and eugenics. It is unfortunate that the research on heredity, together with its practical application to human welfare in the new science of eugenics, should not have more space given to it in his autobiographical Memories; there are but thirty-seven pages—or 11 per cent. of the whole book. The specific importance of the subjects here dealt with is so great that these thirty-seven pages outweigh all the rest of the book. We should like to have had a fuller account by the author of this remarkable work of 1865. He does, however, tell us—and it is a very striking statement—that the two articles “expressed then, as clearly as I can do now, the leading principles of Eugenics.”
The chief point in which he came to differ from the Macmillan articles was that he was then “too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation, and not enough of the