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In reading this great book it is, I think, impossible to doubt the strength of the work.  The quiet relentless way in which his territory is pegged out, and the clear wisdom with which the terms of the new science are defined, are equally impressive.  And for lighter enjoyment his illustrations are to be recommended.  He has to settle precisely what he means by a man being eminent or illustrious before he can begin to ask—are these

qualities hereditary?  An eminent man is one in four thousand, and to make clear what this implies, he writes: “On the most brilliant of starlight nights there are never so many as 4000 stars visible to the naked eye at the same time; yet we feel it to be an extraordinary distinction to a star to be accounted as the brightest in the sky.” [27a]  If we could imagine that each new night shows us a fresh set of stars, we might speculate as to how many nights we should watch the sky before we found one bright enough for a Galton.

In the same way he tries to make us see a million, because in that number there is but one illustrious man.  He worked it out in Bushey Park, where he had gone to see the horse-chestnuts in flower, and came to the astonishing conclusion that, taking one half only of the avenue and the flowers visible on the sunny side of that row, it would require 10 miles of avenue to give 1,000,000 spikes of blossom.

Later he defines mediocrity in a way not very flattering to those, who, like myself, live in the country.  Mediocrity [27b] then “defines the intellectual power found in most provincial gatherings, because the attractions of a more stirring life in the metropolis and elsewhere are apt to draw away the abler classes of men, and the silly and imbecile do not take a part in the gatherings.”  On this last point, by the way, I am not convinced.  The research on the heredity of mental and moral characters

leads naturally to eugenics, as in the ‘Macmillan’ paper of 1865.  But before dealing with this I must say a few words about what, in the opinion of some, is Galton’s chief claim to eminence—the study of heredity as a whole.  There is no doubt that he was the first to treat thoroughly and in a strict statistical method, the steps by which one generation passes into the next.  He was pre-eminently a lover of statistics, he was indeed what Goschen called himself, “a passionate statistician.”

He used Gauss’s Law of Error, which Quetelet had already applied to human measurements.  “The primary objects,” he says, “of the Gaussian Law of Error were exactly opposed, in one sense to those to which I applied them.  They were to get rid of, or to provide, a just allowance for errors.  But these errors or deviations were the very things I wanted to preserve and to know about.”

This conception of variation impressed him deeply, so that he remembered the exact spot in the grounds of Naworth Castle where it first occurred to him “that the laws of heredity [28] were solely concerned with deviations expressed in statistical units.”

What may be called the final result of Galton’s work in heredity is, I imagine, his ancestral law, namely that “the average contribution of each parent” to its offspring is one quarter, or in other words, that half of the qualities of the child can be accounted for when we know its father and mother.  In the same way the four grandparents together

contribute one quarter, and so on.  He illustrates this by calculating how much Norman blood a man has who descends from a Baron of William the Conqueror’s.  Assuming that the Baron weighed 14 stone, his descendant’s share in him is represented by 1/50 grain. [29]

This side of Galton’s work is, in the judgment of many, his greatest claim to distinction as a master in the science of heredity.  How far this is so I shall not attempt to pronounce.  It is possibly still too soon to do so.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that Mendelism, the main facts of which are no longer in dispute, will compel the world (if it has not already done so) to look at variation in a very different way to that of Galton.  The Mendelian does not, and never will, look at variation merely as a “deviation expressed in statistical units.”  Nor can he accept the ancestral law, because he has convinced himself that some ancestors contribute nothing in regard to certain characters.

The contrast between Galtonism and Mendelism may be illustrated by an example, which, if not a strict analogy, has in it something illuminating, especially for those who do not know too much of the subject.  Galton seems to me like a mediæval chemist, while Mendel is a modern one.  Galton can observe, or can follow the changes that occur when two compounds are mixed.  But he knows nothing of the mechanism of what occurs.  But the Mendelian is like a modern chemist who calls

the chemical elements to his aid, and is able to express the result of the experiment in terms of these elements.  This is an enormous advantage, and if my analogy is to be trusted, it would seem as though a progressive study of heredity must necessarily be on Mendelian lines.

But it obviously does not follow that the laborious and skilful work of Galton and his school is wasted.  Those who wish to have made plain to them how Biometrics may illuminate a problem which cannot as yet be solved in Mendelian fashion, should read Dr. Schuster’s most interesting book on eugenics.  I am thinking especially of the question as to the heredity of tuberculosis and cancer.  The relation between Galtonism and Mendelism is also well and temperately discussed in the late Mr. Lock’s Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, 1906.

But it is time to speak of Galton as a eugenist—on which if we look to the distant future his fame will rest.  For no one can doubt that the science of eugenics must become a great and beneficent force in the evolution of man.

We must be persistent in urging its value, but we must also be patient.  We should remember how young is the subject.  As recently as 1901 Galton was, in his Huxley Lecture, compelled to speak of eugenics in these terms: [30]

“It has not hitherto been approached along the ways that recent knowledge has laid open, and it occupies in consequence a less dignified position in

scientific estimation than it might.  It is smiled at as most desirable in itself, and possibly worthy of academic discussion, but absolutely out of the question as a practical problem.”