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Vi   Preface

what Galton had done, and so starting from his suggestions make a more thorough map of a district, where Galton would only claim to have made a chart of the cardinal points. In taking this determination I was soon aware that it meant adding a third volume to this Life. I have had to postpone to that volume the discussion of Correlation, the Statistical Theory of Heredity, Personal Identification and Description and Eugenics together with many letters, characteristic of Galton's mentality and of his affectionate disposition. But that volume seems an easy one after the present, for it largely deals with work done after Galton had been recognised as a master and friend.

The multitude of my own tasks from 1880 onwards gave me little leisure to do more than keep in touch with current work; I had small opportunity for considering earlier memoirs, and many of Galton's papers written before I left Cambridge I have only read forty years after their publication. How I now regret that I had not studied them, when with youthful energy still mine I might have pursued further their lines of thought ! How many are the suggestions they make for novel and profitable research ! I shall indeed be content, if this book of mine opens up to the younger men of to-day that field of inspiration, which Galton provided for some half-dozen of us in the 'eighties. How much one seems to have lost by waiting to explore it fully, until one's Wander jahre were for ever gone !

If this second volume be written essentially to bring the thoughts of a great scientist home to the younger scientists of to-day, to show them the wide regions, practical and theoretical, which Galton opened to the mathematician and statistician, there are still some interludes which appeal to a wider audience, such as the beauty of Galton's friendship for Darwin, the interest of his correspondence with De Candolle, and his brief contact with the "Passionate Statistician." The ingenuity of Galton's mechanisms and the originality of his photographic work will attract others, while in the field of psychology it will be found difficult to refute the claim that he was the first English experimentalist.

If the reader should find Chapter XIII of this work more clumsily worded and carelessly written than those which precede it, he will understand the loss which the biographer incurred by the death of his friend, W. Paton Ker, while the book was passing' through the press. Professor Ker's returned proofs, duly loaded with admonition, ejaculation, and humorous chiding, were not only assurance that many of the author's blunders were detected, but led him with delight on more than one occasion to unwonted realms, little sought by votaries of science. Let us rejoice that he has lived,

"And laugh like him to know in all our nerves Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves."

I have again to acknowledge the ready help of Francis Galton's relatives and friends, especially in the matter of portraiture. Even as it is I have had to make a selection from the vast amount of photographic material placed at my disposal, and a portion of that selection is still reserved for the third volume. In contrast to Darwin, Galton was repeatedly photographed, and the result is that we can trace not only the physical changes in his