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OCR Rendition - approximate
Lchrjahre and Wanderjahre 137 extending along a quadrant of the horizon concentrated itself together in the middle to a broad .band of forked lightning, it was splendid. The Black Sea is really very black, I do not know to what it is owing-rocky bottom?. [We] sailed down the Bosphorus through the Symplegades. Egad the Bosphorus beats any thing in the way of a view I have ever set my peepers upon. The kiosks are so opera-scene-like, so white and so much trellis work about them, the mountains are so grand and the Bosphorus so broad and blue, that (I am stuck fast in the mud about how to finish the sentence being afraid of verging on the romantic). Arrived at Stamboul seeing as Byron says "The selfsame view That charmed the charming Mary Montague." The seraglios are splendid, ditto palaces, such a great deal of trellis work about them, and then there are cypresses, and the veiled ladies just looking out [sketch of one] between folds of gauze and very pretty eyes they have too ; then there are the Greeks, I never saw such black eyes in all my life. I should like to put one of them in a rage ; they must look splendid then. I saw the women's slave-market today-if I had had 50 pounds at my disposal I could have invested in an excessively beautiful one, a Georgian. Some of the slaves had their nails dyed in henna. Most of the black ones were fettered, but they seemed very happy dancing and singing and looking an complacently whilst a couple of Turks were wrangling about their prices. I took a Turkish bath today, such a shampooing and lathering and steaming. Now about getting home. These plaguy quarantines have been extended, though there is no plague now in Turkey (a great bore for I wanted to see some cases) and that at Syra with that 'at Trieste will be, I fear 24 days I therefore shall scarcely be able to see you before going to Cambridge. If I can get books I will read away in quarantine at mathematics and classics if I can't why I must learn Turkish or something desperate of that sort. In my last letter (from Pest) I asked you to send me £15 to Trieste-if you have not done so already please send it now-as I shall then have no possible anxiety about money matters. Good bye, loves in all directions. Your affectionate son, FRAS. GALTON. Those who have had the privilege of examining Sir Francis Darwin's journal of his tour in Turkey and Greece, and comparing it with Francis Galton's diary and letters of more than 30 years later, must at once be struck by the close resemblance of the two men ; they sketch much the same objects, in much the same style, and they are both interested in the same sort of things, especially the plague. The impression of the marked hereditary resemblance between uncle and nephew is much strengthened when we read these diaries. Beyond Constantinople the diary-and it is very fragmentary-is all that tells us of Francis's further progress P. G. 18
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