Life of Francis Galton by Karl Pearson Vol 1 : image 0114

The Ancestry of .Francis Galton 55

brothers he was in a position to become a country gentleman, and lie himself says that, when aged 24 he returned from Syria,

" I was conscious that with all my, varied experience I was ignorant of the very ABC of the life of an English country gentleman, such as most of the friends of my family had been familiar with from childhood. I was totally unused to hunting, and

I had no proper experience of shooting. This deficiency was remedied during the next three or four years. Under the advice of my eldest brother, I bought a hunter and

a hack, and began to hunt at the rate of about three days per fortnight in Warwickshire and at neighbouring meets " (Memories, p. 110).

But something else mastered this ancestral instinct. Galton was not to revert to the land and after six years the Wanderlust again sent him forth on his travels. If we knew the little difference which divides one man from another, even within the same family, we, should have the key to most of life's riddles. Of one thing we can be certain, it is not slight variations of environment ; it is the individuality of nature not of nurture.

If we endeavour to sum up the fairly detailed account we have given of Francis Galton's kinships, can we attribute to their different sources some of the chief physical and mental characters we note in him? The following may be emphasised as marked features of Francis Galton

Physical. (a) Marked longevity. (b) Very considerable physical
strength and power of endurance. (c) A well knit figure somewhat
above the average height and not tending to corpulence. (d) Regular
features, with nothing unfinished, or at all unkempt about the person,
generally what are described as " good looks." (e) Blue eyes and
light hair. (f) Ailments, asthma and deafness. (g) Good digestion.
Of these physical qualities the marked longevity seems to have
come from Elizabeth Collier ; the physical strength from the Camerons
and Barclays ; the well-knit figure and good looks possibly from Beau
Colyear', though Samuel Galton the second possessed them in a marked
degree. The blue eyes and fair hair were again probably a Barclay
heritage ; the asthma, and also possibly the deafness, a Galton charac
ter-both Samuel Tertius and his father Samuel suffered badly from,
asthma. Thus we realise that in most of his physical characters
Francis Galton was not a Darwin ; Darwin physical characters have

' Of Sir Henry Savile it was said that he was " an extraordinary handsome man, no lady having a finer complexion."

OCR Rendition - approximate