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OCR Rendition - approximate
346 Life and Letters of Francis Galton one or two other heavy pedigrees in hand. I see the " Memories " announced. By the by, I picked up a privately printed " Pedigree of the Family of Darwin " issued in 60 copies only ; it gives your pedigree pretty fully. It will be helpful in doing the Darwins. I must come and see you soon. Affectionately, KARL PEARSON. 7, WELL ROAD, HAMPSTEAD, N.W. October 7, 1908. MY DEAR FRANCIS GALTON, I was indeed sorry to hear yesterday that you had called the day before, and I had not been down at College. It was, indeed, a disappointment, because I want to see you for your own sake and to talk about several things. I have been working very hard in my last few days of freedom to get my Appendices to the memoir on Albinism done. Not the text, that has yet to be written, but the descriptions of the 550 pedigrees and the bibliography through the Press. We shall do the statistical part from this printed Appendix. I have also been gradually getting the plates of photographs printed off. It will be my biggest piece of work should I live to complete it. Meanwhile to-day all the rush of the term has begun. I have four new postgraduate biometricians of good type, one a doctor working at plague bacilli and opsonins ; another a biologist from Harvard, and a third who is taking up the influence of -earlier judgments on later judgments. - In Eugenics we are all hard at work. The memoir on the inheritance of eye characters and the influence of environment on sight has been delayed, because Nettleship thought we ought to give more account of earlier work. Some weeks have been spent in studying such work, but it really is of very little service for our purposes. Heron is nearing the end of his London children and Miss Elderton of her Glasgow children. She finds the employment or non-employment of mothers influences sensibly but not very markedly the physique of the child, but the employment of the father as measured by the mortality of that employment is also influential, though not so sensibly. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that the employment of the mother is correlated with the mortality rate of -the father's trade. If he follows a bad trade with a high mortality rate, then the mother generally has employment out, or home work. So the wheels of the whole machine are interlocked and it is very difficult to get the simple independent causes either of degeneracy or of physical fitness in children. Your subject looks very good. Can you send we a ticket or two more for people I know would like to hear you? I shall certainly hope to be present. Yours always affectionately, KARL PEARSON. I cannot get to Oxford for the Weldon ceremony to-morrow. I should have liked to be there, but it meant risking a breakdown. The first plates of the f0 Thesaurus" are nearly ready for the engraver, i.e. the drawings are ready and I hope to get it out in November. 42, RUTLAND GATE, S. W. October 8, 1908. MY DEAR KARL PEARSON, It was just a chance visit on the spur of the moment that I paid on an exceptionally fine day to University College. I knew well how busy you would be and shrank from offering myself, but I am very free and could come almost any day and hour you might suggest*. It will be a grief as well as a great pleasure to me if you come on the 14th to the lecture. I have asked the Secretaries to send you cards. But don't think of coming if you are tired. You have indeed both hands full and overfull of work. Thanks for all you tell me about the Eugenics work and the Biometric. To-day one thinks much of the Weldon ceremony. I could not venture to attend it, however gratifying it might in itself be to do so. You will probably have received, or will receive almost immediately, my Memories of my Life. The reading of it will keep,; don't think you are, expected to do that now, in the midst of all your other work. Methuen has got it up, I think, very well and legibly. What an immense deal must be omitted in any autobiography and that not the least important! Ever affectionately yours, FRANCIS GALTON. * Galton had called without warning and found me out.
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