Recognized HTML document
Previous Index Next

Eugenics as a Creed and the Last Decade of Galton's Life 425

centre in what I have termed the " Generant " of the stirp ', the composite individual who represents the entire ancestry of any person. Galton thinks of this in connection with his composite photography, and then introduces these Generants as an improved version of the Chinese worship of ancestors. They were to act as conscience to the new generation, in a land where each citizen studied and was proud of his forebears. That Galton himself thought of this spirit world as more than a valuable " superstition " I very much doubt.

(18) Further Letters of 1910, concerning Eugenics, etc.

THE RECTORY, HASLEMERE. January 1, 1910.

MY DEAR KARL PEARSON, What a noble New Year's greeting you send me! I prize it among the highest of honours, for it will be a landmark in the path of progress of Eugenics. How I admire the forcible and confident beats of your mathematical wings ! Certainly, as you have phrased it, to Francis Calton, not " Sir," which under the circumstances sounds like tinsel. I rejoice in your work all the more, as it covers and includes much that I dearly wanted to see done, but had not strength or capacity to do. Biometrika is just the most suitable form of publication, toot.

You must kindly tell me soon about my contribution to the Eugenics Laboratory for 1911, about which Hartog will wish to know. I am quite prepared to go on as before if you see your way to its continuance, either in the present or in some modified form, consequent on the possibility of Heron wishing to follow an independent line, or more especially to your own desire to be freed from the care of its oversight (I hope not).

Give please my warmest wishes for the New Year to all your party. Wee Ling prospers and grows, and is a favourite. He enjoys a dry bone to chew. What an inexpensive and wholesome Lord Mayor's banquet might be provided if the Guests were supplied each with a plate and a dry bone, and nothing else !

The half sheet of a letter that was mistakenly sent to you, has since been identified.

Ever affectionately and gratefully yours, FRANCIS GALTON. 7, WELL ROAD, HAMPSTEAD, N.W. January 9, 1910.

MY DEAR FRANCIS CALTON, I hope you will not have thought me ungrateful in not replying to your very kind letter before. But I have been very, very busy. Fundamentally trying to get another chapter of the piebalds-i.e. one on the albinotic skin and dealing with pied folk and leucoderma and modern and ancient theories of pigment changes-to press. It is practically finished to-day-my last day of holiday. I have also revised in proof 80 pages on albinism in the negro; got Miss Elderton's paper on parental alcoholism finally passed and to press; and written 20 pages of suggestions to Heron for his big memoir. In addition I have read 10 papers for Biometrika and had to refuse four, which is always unpleasant for it makes foes. I have another half-dozen papers which want writing up and will again be postponed. I don't know whether I told you that last September old Dr Crewdson Benington died. He had been working in the Laboratory for two years, nothing finished, and a wheelbarrowful of manuscripts on skull measurements have come from his friends-" to be edited and finished." He was a curious old fellow-really able in many ways and affectionate, but difficult. He had divorced his wife, and his life was a failure, but he just settled down in the Biometric Laboratory and worked like a lad of 20, and I think we more or less kept him on the tracks. He came four years ago and then disappeared to the upper reaches of the Amazon, but Biometry brought him back again ! The last two years he worked away without a break-and then last long vacation he was all alone in London and there was nobody to look after him. Poor old fellow, I always feel that if I had had time to write him weekly letters, he would still have been measuring skulls !

* See our pp. 20-21, 29.

t See our pp. 392-397 above.

P G III

54


Previous Index Next