heard more of it.  It is at least certain that the sound of the well came to be associated with peaceful days and happy weather in that dear garden.

Another sound I like to recall is connected with the memory of my father.  He daily took a certain number of turns round a little wood planted by himself, and christened the Sandwalk.  As he paced round it he struck his heavy iron-shod walking-stick against the ground, and its rhythmical click became a familiar sound that spoke of his presence near us, and was associated with his constant sympathy in our pursuits.  It is a sound that seems to me to have lasted all those years that stretch from misty childish days until his death.  I am sure that all his children loved that sound.

February, 1912.

II.
FRANCIS GALTON [13]
1822–1911

Francis Galton was born on February 16th, ninety-two years ago, and to-day we are met together to remember him—a word that seems to me more in tune with his nature than the more formal expression commemorate.

He disliked pomposity, but he seems to have loved little private ceremonials.  For instance, when he opened the first notebook in preparation for his autobiographical Memories, he began page I with Falstaff’s words: “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying”—an inverted appeal to truth which no man ever stood less in need of.  And again, at the foot of the very last page of his Memories is a drawing of Galtonia candicans, a little ceremony without words, a hieroglyphic glorification of the honour paid him in giving his name to this African plant.

Many persons, and even some reviewers, form their opinions of books by reading half-a-dozen passages at random.  I have been more scientific in selecting the first and last pages, and from these I conclude that a simple and kindly commemoration

is not out of harmony with the genius of this great and loveable man.

I should like to express my appreciation of the honour done me in asking me to give the first Galton lecture.  In many ways I am a bad choice, since I have had no share in his science of eugenics, neither has my research-work been directly connected with evolution.  I can only hope that in consideration of my delight in the fibre and flavour of Galton’s mind, with its youth, its charm of humour, and its ever-springing originality and acuteness,—I say that I hope these considerations may excuse me for having undertaken an office for which I am in so many ways unfitted.

One of his most obvious characteristics was his love of method.  I do not mean methodicalness, but that he took delight in knowing how to do all manner of things in the very best way.  He also liked to teach his methods to others.  Those who never saw him, or even read his books, will exclaim, “What a bore he must have been.”  One might as well call the lightning a bore for explaining that the thunder was coming, or complain of the match for boring the gunpowder as to the proper way of exploding.  With Galton’s explanations there was a flash of clear words, a delightful smile or gesture, which seemed to say: “That’s all—don’t let me take up your time.”  Nobody was ever more decidedly the very antithesis of a bore than Francis Galton.

He first appeared on the literary and scientific stage as a traveller, geographer, and author of a book on South Africa (1853), and it was the

experience there gained that enabled him to write two years later, in 1855, that wonderful book, The Art of Travel.  There he teaches such vitally important things as how to find water, how to train oxen as pack animals, to pitch a tent, to build a fire, to cook, and a thousand other secrets.

He liked, of course, to be useful to weary and thirsty travellers, but he was as much, or more, impelled by the love of method for its own sake.  He was in fact an artist in method.  The same thing is shown in a letter he wrote to Nature near the end of his life, explaining how to cut a cake on scientific principles so that it shall not become stale.  This again was not so much a philanthropic desire that his fellow men should not have dry cake, as delight in method.

When I re-read The Art of Travel quite recently, I could not find his method of preventing a donkey braying.  My recollection is that, observing a braying donkey with tail erect, he argued that if the tail were forcibly kept down, as by tying a stone to it, the braying would not occur.  I certainly believe myself to have read or heard that this most Galtonian plan succeeded.

Later in life he tried to make his unique knowledge of value to his country.  He writes: [15]

“The outbreak of the Crimean War showed the helplessness of our soldiers in the most elementary matters of camp-life.  Believing that something could be done by myself towards removing this

extraordinary and culpable ignorance, I offered to give lectures on the subject, gratuitously, at the then newly-founded camp at Aldershot.”

He received no answer from the War Office, but a personal application to Lord Palmerston led to his being installed.  He speaks of a few officers attending his course, and adds that the “rude teachings of the Crimean War soon superseded” his own.

In relation to what I have been speaking of, I must here be allowed to turn back to an earlier period of his life.  In illustrating the different dispositions of his sisters, both of whom were dear to him, Galton writes:

“My eldest sister was just, my youngest merciful.  When my bread was buttered for me as a child, the former picked out the butter that filled the big holes, the latter did not.  Consequently I respected the former, and loved the latter.”

Have we not here an early appreciation of method, or must we merely class the memory with the scene in “Great Expectations,” where the terrifying elder sister, Mrs. Joe, prepares bread and butter for her husband and for Pip (her little brother) in an eminently just and disagreeable manner.  May I be allowed to add that a love of butter in the big holes is not hereditary in all branches of the family; I should have loved the sister who picked it out.

At a later stage in his boyhood Galton transferred his study of method from his sisters to his schoolmasters.  He describes what he suffered from the absurd limitations (which still exist) in the education of English boys, and chafed at the

teaching he received.  “Grammar,” he says, “and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for there seemed so little sense in them.”  He suffered in fact like his cousin, Charles Darwin, who groaned over the classics at Shrewsbury School, and forgot what he learned, even to some of the Greek letters, by the time he was nineteen.

In 1838, when Galton was sixteen years of age, he became an indoor pupil at the Birmingham General Hospital.  Here the education was at any rate practical enough, and to this coddled generation it sounds a rough introduction to medicine.  He had to prepare tinctures, extracts, decoctions, and learned to make pills by hand—a slow enough process.  In later life, when he