Recognized HTML document

Statistical Investigations   379

of marks for physical tests, and the problem of the symmetry of the two sides of the body. Such inquiries required an ever available scientific director, and Galton himself was far too busy with the multitude of claims on his energy and executive skill to undertake such duties. He writes

"In brief, what little has been accomplished at the laboratory during the three years of its existence justifies to my own mind the trouble and ekpense I have been put to in building, equipping and maintaining it. But it never reached to my ideal. Besides the objects already named, I was almost equally desirous of establishing a place where the keenness of the senses and other faculties in any individual who applied, might be measured with all the accuracy and painstaking that is achieved by the few biologists who occupy themselves seriously in such pursuits. To effect this it would be necessary to secure the occasional services of a skilled experimenter and to ensure at the same time that a sufficiency of persons should come to be measured. The time did not seem to have arrived for such an enlargement of the existing methods, though I hoped and still hope that it may not be far distant, as the utility of the laboratory becomes more widely appreciated. The measurements thus far employed are of a comparatively rude, but not ineffective, character. It would give me pleasure at any time to receive suggestions as to new and useful special inquiries, such as might be carried out and brought to conclusion without a too serious expenditure of time and effort."

But although Galton was very modest about what his laboratory could achieve in the future without a scientific staff, it really had accomplished a great deal.

"Persons of all ranks went to it', a knowledge of its existence was extending, and it was becoming increasingly frequented up to the day of its closure. Many correspondents in the United Kingdom, in America, and elsewhere, have more or less adopted its methods, and it was, I may add, a great consolation to me to receive, on the very day that I began to dismantle it, the proof sheets of the register, and other forms in many respects like my own, that are to be used in the laboratory at Dublin, which has been set on foot through the efforts, and will be carried on under the superintendence, of Professors Cunningham and Haddon." (p. 32.)

Immediately following2 Galton's Retrospect is a paper by Cunningham and Haddon entitled "The Anthropometric Laboratory of Ireland." They say that Mr Galton, who has given them every encouragement in their work, proposed that they should give some account of the steps they were taking to introduce anthropometric work into Ireland and their aims in doing so.

"We need hardly explain in the Institutewhere the important and interesting results obtained by Mr Galton in this field of inquiry have been so largely made known, that it was these that stimulated us to endeavour to do likewise in Ireland." (p. 35.)

Directly or indirectly Galton's Laboratory was the parent of Anthropometric laboratories at Eton, Dublin and Cambridge; indeed of the much later work also of Schuster at Oxford. Just as Galton generally transferred his laboratory to the varying loci of the British Association, so Cunningham and Haddon proposed peregrinations for their laboratory during the Long

1 Among whom we may note Mr W. E. Gladstone, whose head measurements afterwards were as serviceable to Mr Brock, as those of the Biometric Laboratory on the head of Professor Weldon were to Mr Hope Pinker-both being used for posthumous portraiture. Gladstone was amusingly insistent on the size of his head, saying that hatters often told him that he had an Aberdonian head-a fact which he did not forget to tell his Scottish constituents. It was not, however, of very great circumference and rather low (like Sir Thomas Browne's and Bentham's). It was less than Spottiswoode's, Sharpey's and Galton's own. " Have you ever seen as large a head as mine?" Gladstone said to Galton, on which the latter observed: "Mr Gladstone, you are very unobservant!"

2 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. xxi, pp. 35-9.

48-2