Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History. Sir Francis Darwin
as to future possibilities: “I have lately been led,” he says, “to reflect a little … on the artificial checks, but doubt greatly whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future.” [34a] In the first edition of the Descent of Man (1874), [34b] he distinctly gives his adherence to the eugenic idea by his assertion that man might by selection do something for the moral and physical qualities of the race. It is a great thing that this Society should have had Francis Galton for its Honorary President. It entitles us to feel assured that in following the line of action marked out for ourselves we are on the right track, and that in the difficult pioneer work of helping the English public to realise the deadly need of eugenic reform we are following in Galton’s steps. We are also so fortunate as to have received encouragement and help at the hands of some of the leaders in the science of heredity, Weismann, Yves Delage, Ray Lankester, the late Adam Sedgwick, Poulton, Bateson, and others.
Galton says somewhere [35] that great men have long boyhoods. This was certainly true of him, though I should rather describe as youthful the delightful qualities that never faded out of his nature. It is, I believe, the correct thing to speak of the “golden dreams of youth,” and if by this hackneyed phrase we mean a keenly imaginative outlook, a hopefulness with a certain dash about it, a generous courage—tinged with romance—then Francis Galton had undying youth. And this makes his seriously measured progress in eugenics all the more worthy of our admiration.
In one of the Macmillan articles he wrote: “Many plan for that which they can never live to see. At the hour of death they are still planning.”
It was thus that Francis Galton died, and as year after year we meet together on February 16th, let us think of him and his plannings with affection and respect.
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