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OCR Rendition - approximate
90 Life and Letters of Francis Galton The summer of 1837 had been spent at Worthing with. expeditions on the Downs to Cissbury and Chanctonbury Rings. Frank was studying fishes, making sundials, and riding with his sisters and Darwin. In the preceding Easter he had projected a tour to Bangor, to attend cathedral service there, since he " had never heard it chaunted," then to Snowdon, Beaumaris, and back by Liverpool and Manchester (Letter to Tertius Galton, March 26, 18371). I am not certain whether the tour came off Perhaps it was postponed till the Birmingham and Liverpool Railway was opened. This happened on July 4, and in September Tertius Galton, his daughter Emma and Leonard Homer, travelled from Birmingham to Liverpool, by what is now the London and North-Western Railway, to attend for the first time by train the meeting of the British Association. Francis lingered on at the King Edward School for the first half of 1838', but he knew that his time was over, and that freedom- and more congenial pursuits were soon to come 3. His father had arranged that he should enter the General Hospital, Birmingham, at midsummer as House Pupil. The proposal was made at the Weekly Board, December 8, 1837, Rev. John Garbeth, Chairman, "Resolved: That the Secretary do write to Mr Galton informing him that his son will be admitted a Pupil at the Hospital at Midsummer next at the rate of 200 guineas per annum." It was afterwards arranged that he should postpone his medical studies till October. His appointment was confirmed by the Weekly Board, December 29, 1837, R. T. Cadbury being Chairman. Dr Booth, the husband of his aunt Adele, and Mr Joseph Hodgson, who had seen him into the world, seem to have acted as his medical sponsors. This was the bridge, not a very direct one, but of great import in its influence, by which Francis Galton passed from ' This letter is of considerable interest. Francis discusses quite freely with his father his work in mathematics and his chance of being second in the class. He also discusses with his father the proposition as to the equality of the triangles with two sides of each equal and two not included angles. 2 A boyish poem on the Spanish Inquisition has survived from March of this year. Without any definite evidence, it seems to me to show signs of the study of Erasmus Darwin's verses. Galton never attained any power as a poet, but from sixteen onwards to the end at least of his Cambridge days, he was very fond of making occasional verses. ' In his last school letter to his father, chiefly about the medical man he was to live with in Birmingham, and his gratitude for the new educational departure, Francis notes that the Doctor is "sworn in to-day at Jersey "; he, too, was leaving the field of battle.
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