282 Life and Letters of Francis Galton
lay stress on her power of sympathy. How I pulled through the terrible strain and hurried requirements of the occasion I cannot conceive, but I did, thanks largely to the hearty and tactful sympathy received from Mme de Falbe and Mr Jennings, who bad made Louisa's acquaintance and returned to help. I-could not leave Royat on account of letters, till Tuesday night, arriving in London Wed9 afternoon, where the sympathy of Spencer, and Mary and of Gertrude [Butler] awaited me. Some few days were spent in sorting her possessions and carrying out Louisa's wishes. Then to dear Emma's at Leamington for a week; thence to the Douglas Galtons' at Himbleton also for nearly a week; thence to Mrs Hills" at Corby, all of which greatly braced me. The general kindness of Louisa's and my relations was extreme. On returning Sept. 13 Frank Butler was ready to live with me, a most valuable help against the sense of isolation My own occupations were the inquiries into the Bassett hounds, which led to the "Average Constitution of each Ancestor etc." Proc. Roy. Soc. 2, also "Inquiries into Speed of American Trotters," Proc. Roy. Soc.3 and the method of photographic measurement of horses etc., published to-day Jan. 7, '98'. The Committee on a Physical National Laboratory has been appointed and is taking evidence. The Evolution Committee has not done much, Kew Observatory prospers; Meteorological Council, the usual routine."
Thus it is when one of our number falls out, the ranks close up; social life as a whole goes on; our intellectual tasks are resumed, and our thoughts are turned again from the immediate environment to the non-personal problems of science. Galton rarely referred to the personal in conversation, or in letters, and it has seemed best to his biographer to maintain his reticence, allowing merely the one entry with which he concludes Louisa Galton's Record to tell its own tale.
To sum up the contents of this chapter, I venture to assert that no psychologist, no statistician of energy and imagination can read its pages and not feel that they have provided him with suggestions of many still unsolved problems, for whose solution the world would be not only the wiser but the better. Such is always the outcome of Galton's suggestive mind, and it is on this account-the generosity of ideas-that the reader willingly pardons an occasional conclusion based on apparently scanty data. Beyond those data was always the rich experience of a _mind during the whole of a long life perpetually observing and placing in appropriate categories the actions and thoughts of other men as well as of himself.
' Wife of Judge Hills of Alexandria, and daughter of Sir William Grove, Galton's close friend. A number of Galton's letters to Mrs Hills have recently been purchased from a bookseller for the Galton Laboratory.
2 VoL Lxi, pp. 401-43. - 3 Vol. Lxii, pp. 310-15.
' Galton probably wrote the last sentences of this entry on the day following that, Jan. 6, on which he had started to give the account of Mrs Galton's death.
