Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

by Sir Francis Darwin

These and similar trials were, I think, made in relation to his desire to weigh and measure human faculty in a broad sense. I remember his telling me of his experiments on the mind of the British cabman. His method was to use alternately two different forms of the address to which he wished to go. Thus on Monday he would tell the man to drive him home to 42, Rutland Gate, on Tuesday he would say, “Rutland Gate, 42,” and so on. My recollection is that the cabmen understood more quickly the familiar formula in which the number precedes the name of the street.

There was also a characteristic experiment or inquiry into the intensity of boredom in a lecture audience, by counting the number of fidgets per man per minute. In this case to avoid the open use of a watch, he estimated time by the number of his own breaths, “of which there are fifteen in a minute.” I hope my brother [21] will forgive my adding that he found the Royal Geographical Society meetings good hunting-ground for fidgets, for as Francis Galton remarks, “Even there, dull memoirs are occasionally read.”

Nor must I forget his plan of marking, by means of a hidden apparatus, the beauty of the women he met in the streets of different towns. He classified them as pretty, ugly, and indifferent; in this beauty competition London came out at the top; Aberdeen, I regret to say, was at the bottom.

But in considering the measurement of human faculty we have got quite out of any reasonably chronological sequence, for the book bearing that title appeared in 1883. But the estimation of human characteristics, especially in relation to heredity, was in Galton’s mind several years earlier, and in 1865 he wrote the two papers in Macmillan’s Magazine which contain the germs of his later work on heredity and eugenics. It is unfortunate that the research on heredity, together with its practical application to human welfare in the new science of eugenics, should not have more space given to it in his autobiographical Memories; there are but

thirty-seven pages—or 11 per cent. of the whole book. The specific importance of the subjects here dealt with is so great that these thirty-seven pages outweigh all the rest of the book. We should like to have had a fuller account by the author of this remarkable work of 1865. He does, however, tell us—and it is a very striking statement—that the two articles “expressed then, as clearly as I can do now, the leading principles of Eugenics.”

The chief point in which he came to differ from the Macmillan articles was that he was then “too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social and religious sentiment.” I imagine that the pendulum has now swung the other way, and that one of the most hopeful and practical schemes is the prevention of marriage among habitual criminals and the feeble-minded.

Galton attributes his work in heredity in some measure to the publication of the Origin of Species, which, he says, “made a marked epoch” in his “mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally.”

That Galton personally felt no difficulty in assimilating the new doctrine, he characteristically ascribes to a “bent of mind that both its illustrious author” and himself had “inherited from” their “common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.” But in our day the name of Galton is intimately connected in our minds with the science of heredity, and we forget that he, like lesser men, was a mine fired by the Origin. He was “encouraged,” he says, “by the new views to pursue many inquiries

which had long interested” him “which clustered round the central topics of heredity.” This was the charge with which the mine had been loaded—the Origin was the fuse.

When that book was published in 1859, nearly everyone here to-night must have been too young to know anything of the great change in the colour of human thought which was ushered in. There are more who may remember how twelve years later, when the Descent of Man came out, there was still plenty of clerical and other forms of foolish bitterness. But a man needs to have been in the full swing of mental activity in 1859 to perceive the greatness of the change due to the Origin of Species.