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.