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24   Life and Letters of Francis Galton

ability, which somehow failed of full fruition. Francis Galton's sister writes in her Reminiscences of the year 1826

" We then went on to my uncle Sir Francis Darwin at Sydnope, who sent a pair of horses to help ours up the steep hill to the house. It was a wild place, but very amusing to visit. The six children slept in hammocks and kept pet snakes."

The love of adventure, the scientific and literary tastes of Sir Francis S. Darwin lead me to associate him closely with his godson, and it is strange that of all his Darwin or Galton uncles, Francis Galton in personal appearance seems to me to resemble most closely Francis Darwin. This leads me to emphasise a point which I think is of some importance : the Darwins were not by nature born travellers. Charles Darwin it is true went on the memorable " Beagle " voyage, but probably not because he derived immediate pleasure from travel for its own sake.

"I trust and believe," he wrote, "that the time spent in this voyage, if thrown away for all other respects, will produce its full worth in Natural History ; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is

as respectable an object in life as one can in any likelihood pursue." (Life, t, p. 205.)

Those are not the words of a traveller for the joy of travel, but of one who travels to obtain an end, not from innate Wanderlust. Some of my readers may know that joy in passing on into the unfamiliar, in spending each day under new conditions,-an unknown mortal mid unknowns ! The Wanderlust is a fever which seizes the non-immune, mostly in youth, but may be in the blood, unquenched even in age. Both Francis Galton and Francis Darwin had marked touches of it, and in two ancestral lines-other than the direct Darwin line-we reach men who wandered and fought, and in an earlier century we have little doubt our Francises would have joined another Francis and have reached fame as Elizabethan buccaneers. This love of travel sprung, not from Darwin, but from Colyear and Barclay ancestry; it is manifest even in the scientific work of Galton. Both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton were pioneers in science, but the nature of their work was essentially different. Darwin invaded a new continent with the idea of settling in it. He planned great roads through . it and he largely built them, and organized the country. He left traces of his pioneer work on the face of the, land which must remain as his memorial for all time. Galton also discovered a new world, but he rushed from point to point of it making his hasty maps and ever eager


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