CHAPTER I

FOREWORD

To more than one reader of, this biography the death of Francis Galton, following within five 'years that of one of the keenest of his friends and lieutenants, Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, meant not only the loss of a revered leader, but of another personal friend and counsellor. Some of my" readers will remember quite recent visits, and fertile talk in the white-enamelled, sunlit drawing-room at Rutland Gate, with its collection of Darwin, Galton and Barclay relics ; the table at which Erasmus Darwin wrote, alongside the easel with its powerful, if unfinished, portrait by Furse, telling-as the highest phase of art alone can tell-why and even how Francis Galton inspired men. To such visitors anything written here must appear incomplete and onesided; the atmosphere of a really great man-and such unquestionably Francis Galton was--cannot be reproduced in', words ; the tones of voice, the subtle sequences in phases of thought, the characteristic combinations of physical expression and of mental emphasis, which make the personality, can only be suggested by a great master of words,s or at best outlined by a famous craftsman ; the student of science, unless he be endowed with a poet's inspiration, must fail to provide even such adumbration. Nor again is it easy to portray the essential features of a man who is at least one generation older than yourself. There are in life two barriers between man and man more marked, perhaps, than any others, the reticence of age to youth, and the reticence of age to age. The friends we have grown up with from our youth, whose emotions and beliefs have been moulded under like physical and mental

environments, we may perhaps truly know ; we have caught their

individuality before age laid constraint on its fullest expression. But

the friends of adult life have no common mental history-the com

munity of like growth fails them ; they stand to each other even as

great civilised nations whose culture and art may be revered and

understood, whose knowledge and customs aid but do not replace home

P. G.   I