Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History. Sir Francis Darwin
the other way, and that one of the most hopeful and practical schemes is the prevention of marriage among habitual criminals and the feeble-minded.
Galton attributes his work in heredity in some measure to the publication of the Origin of Species, which, he says, “made a marked epoch” in his “mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally.”
That Galton personally felt no difficulty in assimilating the new doctrine, he characteristically ascribes to a “bent of mind that both its illustrious author” and himself had “inherited from” their “common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.” But in our day the name of Galton is intimately connected in our minds with the science of heredity, and we forget that he, like lesser men, was a mine fired by the Origin. He was “encouraged,” he says, “by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested” him “which clustered round the central topics of heredity.” This was the charge with which the mine had been loaded—the Origin was the fuse.
When that book was published in 1859, nearly everyone here to-night must have been too young to know anything of the great change in the colour of human thought which was ushered in. There are more who may remember how twelve years later, when the Descent of Man came out, there was still plenty of clerical and other forms of foolish bitterness. But a man needs to have been in the full swing of mental activity in 1859 to perceive the greatness of the change due to the Origin of Species.
His two papers in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1865 (Vol. XII., pp. 157 and 318), seem to me very remarkable, and, as I have said, they are passed over too lightly by the author in his Memories (p. 310). They contain a statistical proof of the inheritance of intellectual and moral qualities. [23] And those who would allow the truth of this statement must further agree that it is the first statistical demonstration of this important fact that the world has seen. And he insists that the whole spiritual nature of man is heritable, so that in his opinion there are no traces of that new element, “specially fashioned in Heaven,” which (he says) is commonly believed to be given to a baby at its birth.
The paper contains a very interesting discussion on the development of social virtues by natural selection. He gives, too, a characteristic explanation of that human attribute commonly known as Original Sin, the quality, in fact, which makes men yield to base desires against and in spite of their sense of what is right. He says [24] that here “the development of our nature under Darwin’s law of natural selection has not yet overtaken the development of our religious civilisation.” It may be more briefly described as the conflict between the individual desires with the tribal instincts. It must be remembered that for all this discussion Galton had no Descent of Man to guide him.
I shall come back later to his clear and courageous statement of eugenics in 1865. Meanwhile I must speak of heredity, a word, by the way, introduced by Galton, and for which he seems to have been taken to task.
With regard to the machinery of reproduction the essay is remarkable for containing what is practically identical with Weismann’s continuity of the germ-cell, and Galton’s priority is acknowledged by that author. But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality, but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it. This is true of this very Macmillan’s Magazine article. Who would know of these admirable views on Hereditary Genius and Eugenics, if this were Galton’s only utterance? This is the grain which has increased and multiplied: and it is to-day familiar nutriment, and is now assiduously cultivated by the Eugenics Education Society. But if Natural Inheritance, and Hereditary Genius had not been written; if the papers on eugenics had not appeared, and especially if he had not convinced the world of his seriousness by creating a eugenic foundation at University College, where his friend Professor Karl Pearson carries on the Galtonian traditions—why then the paper in Macmillan would have counted for very little. But it was not quite unnoticed. By my father it is referred to in the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Galton was encouraged and reassured by Darwin’s appreciation of his work: his words in Hereditary Genius [25] are, “I feel assured that, inasmuch as what I then wrote was sufficient to earn the acceptance of Mr. Darwin … the increased amount of evidence submitted in the present volume is not likely to be gainsaid.” He was characteristically generous in owning his debt to the author of the Origin of Species, and characteristically modest in the value he ascribed to my father’s words.
The book on Hereditary Genius strikes me as most impressive. It seems as though the man whom the world had agreed to honour as an admirable and indeed a brilliant worker in geography and meteorology had suddenly grown big. He shows himself to have the power of sustaining a weighty argument in strong and temperate phrase, speaking as judge rather than advocate, and to have definitely taken rank with Darwin, Lyell, Hooker and Huxley, men whose pens have dinted the world, leaving their ineffaceable mark on the road trodden by the march of science.
When I was working at the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, I naturally asked Mr. Galton for leave to publish the letters he had received from my father. But he would not agree. Mr. Darwin, he said, had spoken far too kindly of his work, and he preferred to keep the praise to himself. But later, when he wrote his Memories, [26a] he fortunately realised that it is wiser to think of the value to the world of such documents, than of private likes or dislikes. The letter my father wrote about Hereditary Genius which Galton says “made him most happy” begins:
“I have only read about 50 pages of your book … but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside, I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.” [26b]
In reading this great book it is, I think, impossible to doubt the strength of the work. The quiet relentless way in which his territory is pegged out, and the clear wisdom with which the terms of the new science are defined, are equally impressive. And for lighter enjoyment his illustrations are to be recommended. He has to settle precisely what he means by a man being eminent or illustrious before he can begin to ask—are these qualities hereditary? An eminent man is one in four thousand, and to make clear what this implies, he writes: “On the most brilliant of starlight nights there are never so many as 4000 stars visible to the naked eye at the same time; yet we feel it to be an extraordinary distinction to a star to be accounted as the brightest in the sky.” [27a] If we could imagine that each new night shows us a fresh set of stars, we might speculate as to how many nights we should watch the sky before we found one bright enough for a Galton.
In the same way he tries to make us see a million, because in that number there is but one illustrious man. He worked it out in Bushey Park, where he had gone to see the horse-chestnuts in flower, and came to the astonishing conclusion that, taking one half only of the avenue and the flowers visible on the sunny side of that row, it would require 10 miles of avenue to give 1,000,000 spikes of blossom.
Later he defines mediocrity in a way not very flattering to those, who, like myself, live in the country. Mediocrity [27b] then “defines the intellectual power found in most provincial gatherings, because the attractions of a more stirring life in the metropolis and elsewhere are apt to draw away the abler classes of men, and the silly and imbecile do not take a part in the gatherings.” On this last point, by the way, I am not convinced. The research on the heredity of mental and moral characters leads naturally to eugenics, as in the ‘Macmillan’ paper of 1865. But before dealing with this I must say a few words about what, in the opinion of some, is Galton’s chief claim to eminence—the study of heredity as a whole. There is no doubt that he was the first to treat thoroughly and in a strict statistical method, the steps by which one generation passes into the next. He was pre-eminently a lover of statistics, he was indeed what Goschen called himself, “a passionate statistician.”
He used Gauss’s Law of Error, which Quetelet had already applied to human measurements. “The primary objects,” he says, “of the Gaussian Law of Error were exactly opposed, in one sense to those to which I applied them. They were to get rid of, or to provide, a just allowance for errors. But these errors or deviations were the very things I wanted to preserve and to know about.”
This