6 Life and Letters of Francis Galton
thought, as most will hold too, that the ideal traveller was a man like himself:
"If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then-travel by all means. If, in addition, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe that no career, in
time of peace, can offer to you more advantages than that of a traveller." (4th Edn. p. 1.)
Such then is the Art of Travel planned as Galton himself states during his South African exploration of 1850-51. It deserves a new edition, brought up in substance and illustration to date-if the all-round knowledge, such as Galton had, still has its representative'.
We cannot, however, leave the subject of travel without referring to two or three other enterprises in which Galton had a hand. Notable among these is the Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel, of which he was the originator and editor. It was to be an annual volume and issues appeared for 1860, 1861 and 1862-63. The work Galton tells us just paid its way, and the idea certainly was, and might still be, a good one. The 1860 volume contained papers by W. G. Clark, Leslie Stephen, John Tyndall and others, besides one by Galton himself 2. Much of the matter can be read with pleasure and profit to-day. How wonderfully wise in the light of recent experience seems W. G. Clark's talk with the Frenchman in Genoa over the latter's view that "there will be no secure and lasting peace for Europe until its political system is based upon the principle of nationalities." How this search for a definition of a `nationality' might have warned President Wilson of the difficulties and the danger of the creed he was to propound 60 years later at Versailles! The accounts of early Alpine ascents, the Allelein Horn by Leslie Stephen, the Egischhorn by Tyndall and the attempt on the Matterhorn by Hawkins are- all still worthy of perusal. Galton contributed to the first volume a paper on Spain and the total eclipse of June 1860. He went out with a party in charge of the Astronomer-Royal in H.M.S. Himalaya and saw the eclipse from La Guardia. This was his first visit to Spain and he saw a good deal of the country, staying in the Pyrenees after the eclipse, and "here that remarkable madness of mountain climbing, to which every healthy man is liable at some period of his life, and which I had always believed myself to have gone through once for all in a mitigated form, began to attack me with extreme severity 3." But while he, gives us little account of his mountaineering, he takes up very seriously the question of sleeping or camping out at great altitudes, and gives a very full description of suitable rations for a six-days' outing, and above all of the knapsack sheepskin sleeping bags4 of the French 'douaniers' or the frontier
' A great mass of material for a new edition was collected for and sent to Galton by the late Mr Howard Collins. It will be found in the Galton Laboratory Archives.
2 Galton himself in his list of published papers, Appendix to Memories, p. 324, says the Vacation Tourists contained two memoirs by himself. I have failed to find more than one.
a Vacation Tourists, 1860, p. 446. Galton became from this date even to the end of his days a frequent visitor to the Pyrenees.
4 With his usual desire to test practical efficiency, Galton carried one of these bags 1000 feet above Luchon and spent the night in it during a terrific thunderstorm ! While familiar to
