Francis Galton was born in 1822 into a Birmingham family of Quaker bankers and scientists, and lived long enough to see the twentieth century begin. His Memories of My Life is a memoir arranged largely by subject rather than strict chronology—he says as much in his preface, and warns the reader that a dated list of his publications in the appendix will show what inquiries were underway in any given year. The book moves from parentage and boyhood through medical training, Eastern travel, African exploration, marriage, and then a long middle stretch devoted to geography, meteorology, anthropometry, heredity, and what he called race improvement. It is the record of a Victorian scientific life told by a man who distrusts his own memory even as he mines it.
“A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired.”
From Birmingham Boyhood to the African Interior
The Preface and the Problem of Memory
Galton opens by admitting the difficulty of his task. The “Memories” are arranged by subject rather than strictly by date, and a copious dated list of his memoirs in the Appendix shows what inquiries occupied him in any given year. Book titles, printed in heavy letters, generally summarise the best parts of the corresponding memoirs, though much matter remains unused; he found it hard to decide how much to insert or omit, and fears he failed through over-omission. He borrows the method of the Dictionary of National Biography’s Index and Epitome, adding birth and death dates to each name so readers can see each man’s age relative to his associates. The Contents lists twenty-one chapters, from “Parentage” to “Race Improvement,” with an Appendix of books and memoirs, principal awards and degrees, and an Index.
Falstaff’s Warning and the Vanished Generation
Reading Henry IV, Galton laughs at Falstaff’s soliloquy after Justice Shallow’s exaggerations, then is struck by the line “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!” He heads his memorandum-book with those words as a warning, knowing how hard it is to be veracious about long-past events, since threads of imagination insinuate themselves among memory’s threads until the two cannot be told apart. His old notebooks and letters help, but his two latest surviving sisters—sure storehouses of family dates and particulars—are both dead, one at ninety-three and one at ninety-seven, each clear-minded nearly to the end. Hardly any contemporary friends remain to recall his childhood, and he quotes “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
Birmingham Origins and the Larches
He was born February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, a town to which his father Samuel Tertius, grandfather Samuel John, and great-grandfather Samuel Galton were all closely tied. Family houses that once stood amid green fields have been overspread beyond recognition by hideous outskirts. His grandfather’s place at Duddeston, with gardens charmingly laid out by his great-grandfather, was once a centre of refined entertainment; losing its isolation, it was leased by his father to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum—no one in his senses, he remarked, would live in it—and is now St. Anne’s School, its porticoes shorn off and its gardens turned into railway sidings and gasworks. Galton remembers it distinctly in its beauty in 1830, two years before his grandfather’s death. The Larches, with some three acres of garden and field, was a paradise for his childhood; its site is now covered with small houses, and the two fine larches that flanked it gave him a lifelong love of that tree.
The Lunar Society Inheritance
His six nearest progenitors differed markedly in temperament and bequeathed very different combinations to their descendants. Grandfather Samuel John Galton (1753–1832) was a scientific and statistical man of business, a Fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose select members met at one another’s houses on the night of the full moon and included Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Keir the chemist, Withering the botanist, Watt, and Boulton. Sir Rowland Hill told Galton that what first gave him a taste for science was a small electrical machine made for him as a boy by Galton’s grandfather. Samuel John kept many bloodhounds, loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious three-volume book about them. His statistical bent—arranging data in parallel lines of corresponding lengths, using colour for distinction—passed to his son and other children, rising to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters.
Apprenticeship in the Hospitals
Galton imagines a truthful compilation of doctors’ curative success rates as a guide for patients, with fees regulated by merit. He threw himself into clinical duties: neat bandaging with a dressing board hung from the neck, bleeding from the arm, cupping, issues and setons, fair tooth-drawing, the setting of broken limbs and reduction of dislocations—at one time sixteen arm injuries were under his sole care, though watched. A drunken drayman with both thighs crushed had them amputated while totally unconscious, discovered his legs gone on waking sober, and recovered, prompting Galton to ask why people could not be made dead drunk before operations; chloroform and ether later answered him. Operation cries were characteristic by class of operation, terrible only at first, and seemed disconnected from the operation once attention fixed; different persons felt pain with very different acuteness.
Anecdotes of Pain and Custom
At a Damara Land mission station, a branch outpost had been raided and its people murdered; two escaped women, each with both feet hacked off, crawled twenty miles to safety. Damara women wear heavy copper ankle rings put on in girlhood so they cannot slip over adult feet—the rings are obtained by cutting off the feet. The stumps had healed; asked how they staunched the blood, they gestured stumping the ends into the sand, grinning. Sir James Paget told of a New Zealander who, fashion requiring boots on great occasions, found one long projecting toe prevented fitting, fetched a bill-hook, and chopped off the toe’s end. A man who fell into scalding pitch had one leg cased in adhering pitch, the other cleaned and dressed; days later the pitch came loose and that leg was entirely healed, while the dressed leg remained longer unhealed—a puzzle solved by Pasteur’s germ theory and Lister’s application of it. Galton himself took small doses of pharmacopoeia medicines alphabetically, reaching near the end of C before two drops of Croton oil stopped him.
Hysteria, Delirium, and the Scream
An outbreak of hysteria in the female wards—pure panic, screaming woman after woman—was stopped by rough measures, gentle ones worsening it; a surgeon was said to have quelled one with abundant cold water. Hysteria’s demoralisation showed in gross lies for attention; a paroxysm may resemble epilepsy, distinguished, per a friend, because epileptics bite themselves while hysterics bite others. In delirium tremens, visions of fish or creeping things were indistinguishable from reality; one man implored him to remove an imagined crawling creature. Galton reflects on sanity’s small tableland with unfenced precipices, and on the unexplored power of sound: an elderly gentleman was haunted by Pitt’s voice giving him a pang, and a wounded horse’s shriek is blood-curdling.
King’s College and Richard Partridge
Through Mr. Hodgson’s interest he spent a year at King’s College, lodging with Professor Richard Partridge (1805–1873) in New Street, Spring Gardens, among four or five pupils—higher social surroundings than Birmingham. Partridge, about thirty-four, yellow-haired, humorous, shrewd and kindly, knew Charles Lamb; bachelor dinner guests included Dasent, Wheatstone, and Smee. An admirable draughtsman but no lover of science, his lectures were dry yet enlivened by humour, lacking the “why and wherefore”
Ovampo Country and the Court of Nangoro
The borderland between the Damaras and the Ovampo struck Galton as a natural frontier, unfit for settlement. Beyond bleak plains and a wide belt of thorn-bushes the party came upon fields of maize and then the place of Nangoro, the Ovampo chief. Galton tried to please him with a theatrical crown bought in Drury Lane, but believed he wounded the old man’s pride by refusing the offer of his niece as a temporary wife. She had already been installed in his tent, smeared with red ochre and butter, and he had her ejected with scant ceremony. The Damaras, he notes, are hospitable in this fashion and think missionaries proud for not reciprocating. The party was treated with strict courtesy but no friendliness, and there were signs of a plan to let the oxen starve and then make an easy end of the strangers. The Ovampo traded with Portuguese half-castes and despised their guns, but Galton’s proved superior and were feared. Nangoro would not let him go farther. He turned back with mixed feelings—regret at retreating, relief at escaping safely. The Ovampo were suspicious yet happy and social among themselves, worth friendly study, though a spirit of taboo reigned and simple questions met the answer “You must not ask.”
The Return and the Warning Confirmed
His fears were not fanciful. A party following years later was attacked as they departed and had to fire in self-defence; rumour held that a stray bullet killed Nangoro himself within his stockade. The return journey was hard, and one bitterly cold encampment tried the constitution of his best ride-oxen. The whole party reached Station No. 3 on August 3, 1851, welcomed by Mr. Hahn after five months’ absence without news. Galton had spent ninety days in actual travel—fifty to Nangoro and forty back—covering 168 hours of riding, equal to 462 miles, across the whole breadth of Damara land to the capital beyond it. News from Europe arrived through a cattle-trader, including an English newspaper but no letters for himself; a year and four months had passed since he heard from home. Peace had been kept between the Hottentots and Damaras.
Eastward to Elephant Fountain and Tounobis
No ship was expected before December, leaving four months for further travel. Galton resolved on a quick journey east of the Namaqua country, sending messengers with letters to the Cape and enlisting the Namaqua chief Swartboy. He divided his party and started afresh on August 13 with one wagon, Andersson, three servants, and five or six active Damaras, going first to Jonker, who received him kindly. There he found Erhardt, a schoolmaster imported by the missionaries, fluent in Dutch and English and fair in Hottentot, whom he engaged to guide him as far as Elephant Fountain, the missionaries’ ultima Thule. He was also asked to settle disputes among other Namaqua chiefs. They left Jonker on August 30 and reached Elephant Fountain on September 11, a country of big game with a copious spring named for the many tusks found in the water, as though elephants travelled there to die. It lay in a corner of the district claimed by chief Amiral, who joined him for a shooting expedition; he and his people seemed more civilised than other Namaquas, nearer to the Dutch Boers. Leaving the wagon guarded, they reached Twas about the 28th, then crossed an arid plain to Tounobis—twenty and a half hours of actual desert travel—into an ideal country of big game. Crowds of Bushmen were encamped near the water, busy with pitfalls and securing an elephant that had fallen into one. Galton became great friends with the Bushmen and heard stories of a body of strange Namaquas from the south who had swept onward to Lake Ngami. A feasible road from Walfish Bay to the interior was thus established, and he had travelled it as far as Tounobis.
Homeward and the Reckoning
After a week at Tounobis, Amiral wished to return home, and tired oxen forbade Galton to go farther. He was back at Walfish Bay on December 5; the schooner arrived on January 16, 1852. He parted with Andersson, Hans, and most of the men, sailed to St. Helena, and returned to England. The distances were reckoned: Walfish Bay to Station No. 3 at Barmen, 207 miles; Barmen to Nangoro, 512; Barmen to Tounobis, 311—1,030 miles out and nearly as many back. Only aboard the vessel carrying him away did he grasp the severity of the anxiety he had borne, able at last to sleep in complete security. He lost not one of his many men to violence or sickness. The journey had been made with servants unqualified for their work, who grumbled, held back, and even mutinied, over whom he held only moral control; the cattle had to be broken in; he had to call into service an indolent and cruel set of natives speaking an unknown tongue. The country was in savage warfare when he arrived, and the fighting had to be stopped before he could proceed. He had no food except the cattle he drove. His success, he insists, was owed to Andersson and Hans.
Spencer, the Derby, and a Circle of Friends
At Sir John Lubbock’s he met Herbert Spencer, then struggling with the difficulties of serial publication. An American visitor with a gold watch announced that Spencer’s American admirers, fearing his pamphlets would stop for want of money, had subscribed and invested a handsome sum in his name in Consols, and had deputed him to present the watch as a token of esteem. Spencer always wore it, and it worked well, unlike some costly presentation watches of the day. Galton often met him at the Athenaeum; Spencer listened sympathetically to new views but disliked arguing. Once Galton took him to the Derby with an Oxford clerical don relative—an incongruous pair who enjoyed each other. Spencer was not roused to enthusiasm, remarking that the crowd on the grass looked like flies on a plate and that the event was as he had imagined; yet he evidently liked the outing and repeated it at least once. Galton especially enjoys the start of races—bright coats, sharp jockeys, delays from false starts—and would run to rising ground for an opera-glass view of the finish. Studying the tint of faces in the distant stand, he once saw the prevalent colour turn distinctly pink under excitement as the horses approached, and wrote a notice to Nature under his initials. He enjoyed over fifty years’ friendship with the Hon.
A Cambridge Festival and the Roots of Heredity
Near the close of his undergraduate days, Galton recalls a Cambridge festival that began in solemnity and widened into good fellowship without excess. Songs were sung, and J. Mitchell Kemble—the subject of Tennyson’s early ode—set the company alight by raising his arm and moving his glass in time to a chorus, driving the room into an enthusiasm Galton likens to the effect of a timed tom-tom, or of a performer in a Bulwer novel controlling an audience with a stick. The senses, rhythmically stimulated in exact cadences, can elicit overwhelming emotion; the matter, he thinks, has never been sufficiently investigated. A footnote traces Kemble’s descent from the Kembles and Siddonses, a family thick with actors.
Darwin’s Book as an Awakening
The chapter on heredity opens with Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which Galton calls an epoch in his mental development. It demolished dogmatic barriers and roused in him a rebellion against ancient authorities contradicted by modern science. He laments the perversity of educated people who misunderstood “Natural Selection” and attacked it in press and pulpit without knowing what they discussed—plain facts are grasped at once, but a new idea demands an altered balance of mind, repugnant and painful to achieve. Galton himself felt little difficulty, devouring and assimilating the book, perhaps because he and Darwin shared a hereditary bent from their common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.
The Word “Heredity” and the Cambridge Class Lists
Encouraged, he pursued inquiries into heredity and the possible improvement of the human race. Current views were vague and contradictory: most authors granted that bodily and some mental qualities were inherited by brutes but refused to believe the same of man, and theologians drew a sharp body-mind distinction on dogmatic grounds. The subject had never been squarely faced; even the word “heredity” was thought fanciful, and a cultured friend chaffed him for adopting it from the French. He was struck by obvious heredity among the Cambridge men of his time. Of the forty-one Senior Classics from 1824 to 1864, seven had a father, brother, or son of notable success—three Kennedys, two Lushingtons, a Wordsworth, a Butler—which justified a fuller inquiry. Heredity, he found, displayed itself in every direction, the Myttons being an instance of peculiar hereditary temperament.
Hereditary Genius and Darwin’s Verdict
After months of work he published two preliminary papers in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1865, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” containing the germs of Hereditary Genius (1869), English Men of Science (1874), Human Faculty (1883), Natural Inheritance (1889), and his later writings on eugenics. Re-reading them, he is surprised at their justness and comprehensiveness despite their crudeness. He kept his memoirs bound in volumes—more than 170 publications—and is pleased to still agree with nearly all of them. Hereditary Genius made its mark despite captious criticism. He awaited Charles Darwin’s verdict above all others. Darwin wrote that he had read about fifty pages and must exclaim that he had never read anything more interesting and original, praising its clarity; his son George, who finished it, said the earlier chapters were nothing in interest to the later ones, and his wife read it aloud with much interest. Darwin confessed himself converted, having always maintained that, excepting fools, men differed little in intellect, only in zeal and hard work—still an eminently important difference. Galton’s rejoinder: character, including the aptitude for work, is heritable like every other faculty.
Proofs, the Athenaeum, and the Fellows of the Royal Society
Overworked while correcting proofs, he feared mistakes; one was absurd—a commingling of notes on the families of Jane Austen and of Austin the jurist. As a member of the Athenaeum Club Committee he was “given it hot” by representatives of each family, most decorously. He corresponded with Alphonse de Candolle, whose Histoire des Sciences et des Savants analysed why nations, especially the Swiss, were more prolific in science at one time than another, and thought a similar investigation of English men of science might be advantageous. In 1874 he daringly asked every Fellow of the Royal Society who had filled an important post to answer many questions, some touching religion and delicate matters, sent on the distinct understanding that answers were for statistical purposes only. He took advice, notably from Herbert Spencer, and thinks—though is not certain—from Dr. W. Farr, who headed the Registration Department.
Eugenics as a Secular Creed
Too old and infirm to supervise his laboratory properly, Galton is glad a successor has taken it under able superintendence, and valuable memoirs continue to issue from it. The newly established Sociological Society was disposed to take up race improvement; he lectured at its meetings in 1904 and 1905 on “Eugenics, its Scope and Aims,” “Restrictions in Marriage,” “Studies in National Eugenics,” and “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion.” Eugenics is officially defined in the Minutes of the University of London as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.” Skilful statistical treatment is needed, technical and dry in method but not in result; a Eugenics Education Society was recently founded to popularise those results, and at its Committee’s request he joined as Honorary President.
Charity, the Fit, and the Unfit
A true philanthropist, he argues, concerns himself with society as a whole. Devotion solely to the nation makes conclusions heartless—deserving Carlyle’s label “dismal” for statistics—while attention only to certain individuals breeds favouritism, oblivious to others’ rights and the futurity of the race. Charity refers to the individual, statesmanship to the nation; eugenics cares for both. A considerable part of the huge stream of British charity indirectly supports the production of the Unfit, and it is most desirable that money and attention now bestowed on harmful charity be diverted to the production and well-being of the Fit. Newly married couples fall into three classes by the probable civic worth of their offspring: a small class of “desirables,” a large class of “passables,” and a small class of “undesirables”; social, moral, and timely material help should reach the desirables rather than be monopolised by the undesirables. He takes eugenics seriously, feeling its principles ought to become a dominant motive in a civilised nation, much like a religious tenet.
Replacing Natural Selection
Individuals, he writes, appear as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of Being; this world is a stage for evolution, principally by natural selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard for the individual.
The Family as Laboratory
Galton’s opening chapter sets a pattern the whole book follows: he is less interested in his relatives as personalities than as evidence. His grandfather Samuel John Galton, a Fellow of the Lunar Society who kept bloodhounds and wrote a small book on birds, arranged data in parallel lines and used colour to distinguish categories—a statistical habit that reappears, in stronger form, in his descendants. The six nearest progenitors, Galton notes, differed markedly in temperament and bequeathed very different combinations to their children. This is not idle family piety. It is the raw material for the argument he would spend his later life making.
The same instinct governs his account of Cambridge. He counts the Senior Classics from 1824 to 1864 and finds seven with a father, brother, or son of comparable distinction, then treats the Myttons of his hunting years as an instance of hereditary temperament running to ruin. Even his anecdotes about hysterics who bite others rather than themselves, or the man who chopped off his own toe to fit a fashionable boot, serve a collector’s purpose: they are specimens of human variety, filed for later use.
The Argument About Heredity
Darwin’s Origin of Species arrived in 1859 and, by Galton’s own account, demolished the dogmatic barriers of his education. What followed was a campaign to extend natural selection into the human case, where most authors of the day would grant inheritance of bodily qualities in animals but not in man. He notes with some irritation that even the word “heredity” struck a cultured friend as a French affectation. Hereditary Genius appeared in 1869, and Galton waited anxiously for Darwin’s verdict, which came in a letter praising the book as the most interesting and original thing he had read—while gently recording that he had always held men to differ little in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. Galton’s reply is the hinge of his whole career: character, including the aptitude for work, is heritable like any other faculty.
The later chapters push the argument toward policy. Eugenics is defined in the book as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, and Galton proposes that charity toward individuals and statesmanship toward the nation must be held together rather than played off against each other. He worries that a large stream of British charity indirectly subsidises the production of the unfit, and he wants help redirected toward the fit. His stated aim is to replace natural selection—excessive production and wholesale destruction—with something more merciful and no less effective.
The Instruments of Precision
What saves the book from being merely a manifesto is the sheer ingenuity of the middle chapters. Galton’s anthropometric laboratory, his composite portraits, his finger-print research, his meteorological tracings from Kew, his statistical work on regression and ancestral inheritance—each is described with the pleasure of a man who liked making things. The finger-print study is characteristic. Asked to lecture on Bertillon’s system of criminal identification, he noticed that its statistical claims treated different bodily measurements as independent when they plainly are not, and he said so. Then he took up thumb-marks, wrote to Nature for information, and heard from Sir William Herschel, who had used them in India for years. Galton established constancy through life, the variety of patterns, and a workable classification—three facts, he insists, that had to be proved rather than assumed.
His theoretical gloss on the patterns is telling. Because the classes of fingerprint resemble genera and were formed without the aid of natural selection, he concluded that selection has no monopoly on moulding genera; internal conditions must matter quite as much. The same taste for discontinuity appears in his admiration for de Vries’s mutations and in his comparison of both to Tyndall’s account of how a glacier adapts to its bed through successive internal crunches and re-freezings.
A Life Measured
The book’s final movement is elegiac without meaning to be. Galton admits he is too old and infirm to supervise his laboratory, though glad a successor has taken it on. He joins the Eugenics Education Society as honorary president, hoping to help as far as advancing age permits. The appendix lists more than 170 publications, and he reports with quiet satisfaction that on re-reading them he still agrees with nearly all.
What emerges across the whole is a portrait of a particular kind of nineteenth-century mind: endlessly measuring, classifying, and counting, convinced that the human world yields its secrets to the right instrument, and largely untroubled by the question of who holds it. The book’s interest for a modern reader lies less in its conclusions than in watching a formidable intelligence build its apparatus piece by piece—and in the occasional glimpse, as when he recalls the two monkeys that died in each other’s arms in a cold scullery, of something the instruments could not capture.
