The Ancestry of Francis Galton 57
nature arose from the same, source. Although a most distinguished mathematician has appeared in the Darwin stock, and it is stated that Erasmus Darwin the younger was' statistically minded, there was no trace of it in Erasmus the elder, and it may be safely said that statistics were almost distasteful to Charles Darwin himself. On the other hand Samuel Tertius Galton, as we have already seen, published a statistical tract, and he and quite a number of his family delighted in numerical and statistical representation. There is hardly a doubt that this was in Francis Galton an emphasised Galton heritage, not wholly unassociated with considerable power of fine draughtsmanship, which we also ffi~d in other members of the family. During many years of friendship with Francis Galton, his present biographer never saw him handle the pencil nor had any reason to believe he had special aptitude_ in this matter ; and yet examining his earlier notebooks and diaries we ' find them full of sketches which show that be had equal capacity with his sisters in draughtsmanship. When we read also the accounts of the work of his Galton ancestry in Birmingham, the manner in which they not only built up a great business, but also were continually engaged in public and charitable work, we must again place to their credit the passion Galton exhibited to turn all his work to public service-to regard all science as subservient to human. progress. He was not content that the Eugenics Laboratory should produce merely scientific memoirs ; he repeatedly urged its members to place their results in a popular form before a wider public. He disliked technical terms, and demanded the expression of results in language that all men can understand. Probably he and the present writer were not quite at one on this point, partly because the latter believed that new technical terms are needful in every progressive branch of science, partly because the writer thought that Biometry and Eugenics must in the first place establish themselves by the production of work especially appealing to the scientific world. Francis Galton pulled his way, and his biographer pulled in the opposite, both, perhaps, with something of Quaker stubbornness, but never with the least personal friction, and in the end came the compromise which marks the publications of the Galton Laboratory and the directions for its guidance in his will. Reference is made to these matters here because it must be fully realised that the social utility of his work was not a secondary but a primary motive in Galton's character. Charles Darwin thought that to add to the sum of knowledge
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