SCIENCE UP TO DATE

Evening Star, Issue 15075, 6 January 1913, Page 8

SCIENCE UP TO DATE

SIR FRANCIS GALTON AND PRACTICAL SCIENCE. [By J amus Coixikr.] (Special Rights Secured by the ‘ Star.') Francis Gallon was one of those English gentry who reflect a sometimes dazzling brightness on the history of science and the science of history in Great Britain. Other countries do net, indeed, lack spelt men—the minxes of Button. Lavoisier, and LaElace. ,nrd of Broglie, Haussonville, and De aulcy in more recent times, would rise tip against us in France alone—but, in later years at least, England stands out preeminently as a nurse of such untrained greatness. In history, Gibbon. Freeman. Elton, and E. IV. Robertson; in anthropology, Lubbock. Tylor, and Gonne; in geology, Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Roderick Murchison; in biology, Darwin and Romanes ; and in philosophy, Shadworth. Hodgson, are examples of men of independent means, not officially attached to the great teaching corporations, but self-dedi-cated to the pursuit of science, history, and philosophy. Francis Gallon was another of these, and one of the most distinguished. Few of our British contemporaries have left a deeper mark on science.

—His Early Education and Training.— Like' Matthew Arnold, Mendel, and -Sir H. .Maine, he was bom in 1822. His education was curiously irregular, and it was doubtless answerable {or the irregularity of bis subsequent pursuits. His professional training preceded, in part, Iris general education. He walked the hospitals before, not after, he had gone to Cambridge. He belonged to a medical dynasty, like his cousin, Charles Darwin, and, like Darwin, he was intended to be a medical practitioner. He had aptitudes for his chosen profession. A man of independent means, Gallon equipped an expedition to Africa in furtherance of the express desire of the society, and enabled them to publish a valuable memoir and maps relating to a country hitherto unknown —the country of the Namaquas. the Damaras, and the Ovampo, where the latitude and longitude of the places were accurately determined. He was granted the gold medal of the society in 1854, and was elected F’.R.S. in 1856. The young squire of science had won his spurs. The uncoitainty of his health hindered him from taking any further active part in the woik of exploration, but he clung to the pursuit. In 1855 he published ‘The Art of Travel,' with general instructions for travellers, and in 1850-63 he edited four volumes of memoirs by ‘Vacation Tourists.’ He was an efficientpresident of the R.G.S.. and he presided over the geographical section of the British Association when Stanley read his famous paper on the discovery of Livingstone . —Early Inventions.— All his life Galton was an inventor. In 1850. when electrical communication had been recently introduced, he invented a teletype for automatically printing telegrams. In 186S he devised a liand-heliostat for flashing sun-signals from on board ship or on land in surtny climes. He- contrived it long before the present system of sunsignalling had been invented. Mas not some such system in nse in Spain during the Peninsular War? A mere accident determined the angle, at which this great savant should approach science. Kew Observatory was built as the plaything of a mad King, George 111., and when he died it was given, up, on their request, to the pien of science. The British Association kept it up till it fell into the hands of the Royal Society, who made it a paying concern by making charges for standardising instruments. Government assisted and J. P. Gassiot endowed it. Thus a typical British institution soon became the central magnetic observatory of the world. Appointed a member of the committee through his friendship with Sir Edward Sabine, Gallon eventually became chairman of the observatory. He worked at an apparatus for standardising sextants. He contributed another for verifying thermometers, and now 20,000 are there annually tested. He established the rating of chronometers. Telescopes and field glasses supplied to the Army and Navy were verified.

—The Founding of 'Meteorology—as an art in England is largely due to Francis Galton. Commander Maury, our old Governor, Captain Fitzßoy, and the French astronomer Leverrier had all contributed. Till then the cyclone was the only feature of the weather that had been closely studied. Galton now took up the subject, and, after collecting a huge mass of data, he tried to arrange them and deduce assured conclusions He discovered that, if a cyclone was an uprush of air, twisting in an anti-clockwise direction, associated with a cLiiidy sky and a lew barometer, there was a succeeding and supplementary (should he not have said a complementary?) si stem, co isisting of a downrush of air in a clockwise direction, associated with a clear sky and a high barometer. This lattei system ho named, in 1862, an anti-cyclone. The generalisation set up a new departure. All the movements of the lower strata of the air have ever since been looked on as a combination of cyclones and anti-cyclones, which feed one another. It was a great advance in meteorological science, and it was followed by an equal advance in the meteorological art. Daily weather charts, designed by Galton, appeared in ‘ The Times ’ from 1868 onwards; storm warnings were issued to seaports; data for marine charts were collected; and a few well-equipped self-recording observatories were built. —Heredity.— Hitherto Galton had hardly done rno,e than dally with his themes. ‘New he was approaching the greatest of his fields. The publication of the ‘Origin of Species’ in 1859 had on him a revolutionary effect. Having a hereditary bent of mind in the same direction as Darwin, doubtless derived from the same common ancestor, Dr Erasmus Darwin, he simply devoured’ the book and assimilated it as' fast as ho devoured it. What interested him in it even more than its theoretical significance was its practical impedance. How could hereditary transmission foie of the postulates on which natural selection rested) bo governed or guided, and how could the human breed be thus improved? Gallon's business was now to ascertain the laws of heredity (a word that he introduced from the French and incurred- the ridicule of Matthew Arnold for so doing), and. still earlier, to establish tiie fact. For it was by no means generally accepted. Breeders had proved that it was true of domestic animals, but few believed it to apply to human beings._ He had been struck ‘with the many obvious cases of hereditary talent among his fellow-undergraduates at Cambridge; he now found luilher eviaences of tliG sjiino fset in all directions -After ma-.rj months ot labor in accumulating data he set down his conclusions in two remarkable articles published in 1865 in ‘Macmillan's -Magazine.' which none who have read them are likely to have forgotten._ As is true of Darwin's ‘Voyage.’ Carlyle's ‘Sartor Resartus.’ Spencer's ‘Social statics,’ and many other books these two seemingly slight articles co. tained the germs of all his later ideas. Four years later came his great work on • Hereditary Genius.’ a work that absolutely founded the new science of heredity. It has but one fault—the title is a misnomer. It establishes the heredity of talent beyond all question or cavil; it does not prove the heredity of genius, because that has never existed. The facts accumulated in sunport of his positions are overwhelming in number and mass; his reflections are sagacious and sometimes profound: and his diction is adiaphanous—it interposes no screen between the reader's mind and its object, but seems to present the facts as if they were themselves speaking. Ever practical, Galton went on with his inquiries and experiments. The results of his inquiries, made by the then

—X«iv Method of Circularising,— showed that- aptitude for science was an inborn and hereditary gift, not an acquired power. His experiments were made to test the truth of Darwin’s doctrine of pangenesis. If that hypothesis were well founded, then blood transfused from one litter of rabbits to another of a different variety—say, from grey to silver, should carry with it an alteration in the breed. But experiments made with 13

litters showed conclusively that no such alteration was effected. Further experiments niado by G. J. Romanes led to the same result. The doctrine of pangenesis was definitely overthrown. But, if Darwin's theory was fake, what was —The True Theory of Heredity?— Gallon was not the man to blink the issue. In 1875 there appeared in the •Contemporary Review' an essay by him entitled ; ‘ A Theory ’of Heredity.’ It attracted little attention at the iime: it escaped the notice of Wallace, apparently also of Darwin, and (to my knowledge) of Spencer. Vet, it deeply concerned all three. Thirteen years afterwards Wallace read it, and perceived that the theory expounded was identical with that of Weismann, against which, 18 years later. Spencer had to do battle. Romanes read it, and experimented in order to test the theory. And (I may be pardoned for mentioning) I read it myself, and brought it out to New Zealand, whore also it was unknown. 1 could not help discerning that, if Gabon's theory were established, the foundations of Spencer's biology, psychology, and philosophy generally would be pulled from under them. Twenty years later Mr Arthur Balfour drew the same inference. As always with Galton. the practical side of his nature kept the upper hand, and, instead of pursuing speculations that would have gained him a fame equal to that of Weismann, he wont off on a less theoretical track. The difficulty in finding evidence in support of the transmission of new variations revealed the necessity of making a multitude of exact measurements of every faculty of body and mind for at least two generations., Dean Farrar had them made at Harrow Public School, and Galton, himself, equipped laboratories at the various international and health exhibitions, where the keenness and soundness of the senses, the muscular and breathing-power. the reaction time, the height and weight, the size and shape of the skull were all measured and recorded. As many as 400 sets were published. To this department of human faculty Galton made one, important addition. He introduced the recording and classification of finger-print, now so impoitant a means of identifying criminals. To him, also, we owe —The Composite Portrait.— By means of a method of his own lie photographed groups of persons belonging to the same type or class, such as criminals, consumptives, members of the same family, or scientists, and ho thus educed the criminal, consumptive, family, or scientific type. Evidently the ingenious idea can be widely applied. —The Founder of Eugenics.— We have space left only for the last, but, perhaps, the most important, of Gallon's labors. He had already sounded the note of Eugenics in one of those pregnant essays published so long before as 1865, but public opinion was not then ripe to accept even the elementary truths on which the improvement of the human breed depends. In consequence, he laid aside the subject for many years. In 1884, in his hook on ‘ Human Faculty,' and again in the Huxley Lecture in 1901, he threw out feelers. Ever practical, he founded an establishment for the pursuit of Eugenics, and, at a later date, he promoted its academic equipment. The aim of the new science was twofold—to check the birth-rate of the unfit, and to augment the productivity of the fit. it (or rather the art that is based on the new science) would replace natural selection by a more merciful and not less effectual social selection. It would endeavor to secure that no more individuals should be brought into the world than can properly be cared for, and those should be only of the best stock.