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 He speaks of a few officers attending his course, and adds that the “rude teachings of the Crimean War soon superseded” his own.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 saw a pill-making machine at work, it must have been his boyish memories which inspired the characteristic calculation that if a grandmotherly Government possessed forty-five of these engines, it could supply each inhabitant of the British Isles with one pill per diem.