Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

by Sir Francis Darwin

It was in the surgery that he had most experience; he and the other indoor pupils were called up at all hours to dress burns, to patch broken heads, and reduce dislocations, with, as it seems, very little instruction. It was doubtless a fine bit of education in self-reliance, and he must have learned much that was of use in his South African travels. Whether as a student of method he approved of his rough and ready education is not quite clear. His genius for experiment, or rather that priceless capacity for extracting unexpected conclusions from experience, comes out in his

account of a case in the Birmingham Hospital. An injured drayman was brought in dead drunk, and underwent amputation of the legs without any signs of feeling pain. This set Galton wondering whether patients might not with advantage be made drunk before operations—a query which was to be happily answered by the discovery of anæsthetics.

Another characteristic event was his attempt to learn the properties of all the drugs in the pharmacopœia by personal experience. He determined to dose himself alphabetically, but got no further than C., for the effects of croton oil put a stop to his thirst for first-hand knowledge.

We must pass over his time at King’s College, London, where, as he sat at lecture, he could see the “sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on the Thames,” a vision which stirred his blood with a longing for adventure, and which, as he characteristically noticed, always occurred when the weather-cock on the Horse Guards showed that the south-west wind was blowing.

We must, in like manner, skip his undergraduate days at Trinity, Cambridge. We thus arrive by a devious route at the period when he returned a traveller and geographer of recognized merit, and began the work with which he was practically connected for many years, as a member of the Meteorological Committee. His best-known contribution in the science was in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1862, where his discovery of the anticyclone was first described; but he also had a good deal to do with the printing and

publishing of the now familiar weather charts. Meteorology takes us from 1861 to 1863, that is nearly to 1865, when his first paper on heredity appeared, which was at the same time his first paper on hereditary genius. This line of research was to form his chief claim to celebrity and must be separately treated.

Meanwhile I wish to say something of his love of experiment, which is a branch of his devotion to method. We know something of the more entertaining of his inquiries from his delightful book of Memories, yet I cannot but fear that he has left out many experiments even stranger than those he publishes. My father had a special affection for what in his own case he called “Fool’s experiments.” These are what, I am afraid, Galton may have omitted. Still there are records of some delightful lines of work. He is probably the only man who ever attempted to solve by experiment the problem of free will and determinism. He limited his inquiry to the question—whether there exists in human affairs such a thing as an “uncaused and creative action.” The experiment, or rather self-observation, was carried on (1879) for six weeks, almost continuously, and “off and on for many subsequent months.” He found that with practice he could nearly always trace the “straightforward causation” of a given action, which at first seemed to have been performed “through a creative act, or by inspiration.”

Then there was his attempt to experience the feelings of the insane. “The method tried was to invest everything I met, whether human, animal, or inanimate, with the imaginary attributes of a

spy.” The trial was only too successful; by the time he had walked 1½ miles to the cab-stand at the east end of the Green Park “every horse in the stand seemed watching” him, “either with pricked ears, or disguising its espionage.” He adds that hours passed before this uncanny sensation wore off. On another occasion he managed to create in his mind the feelings of a savage for his idol, the idol in his own case being a picture of Mr. Punch.

These experiments seem to me very characteristic of the man in their originality, their humour, and their unexpected measure of success, for personally, I should have prophesied failure in all. They have a special bearing on Galton’s belief that a quasi-religious enthusiasm for eugenics may be built up. I have sometimes wondered that he should believe this great change so feasible, but I understand how he came to think so when I read of his strange power of impressing beliefs on himself, with such force as to leave a trail of discomfort in the mind after the make-believe had ceased.