The polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911) led a privileged and adventurous life, lending his talents to the development of statistical inference, scientific meteorology, psychology, and becoming one of the first to apply the evolutionary theories of his cousin Charles Darwin to human populations, founding the new fields of eugenics and biometrics. Born in Birmingham, England, on Feb. 16, 1822, Galton was still a boy when he was first gripped by a "passion for travel," touring eastern Europe and the Levant in the months before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1840. At his parents' insistence -- and having already spent time studying at the General Hospital in Birmingham and at King's College, London -- Galton studied medicine at Cambridge. Yet medicine was not in his future. When his father died in 1844, the same year that he took a poll degree, Galton found himself liberated from the need to work, and almost immediately embarked upon a tour up the Nile as far as Khartoum and from there, to Syria. For five years, he dabbled in the sporting life, but after becoming thoroughly bored with leisure, he returned to travel. Approaching the Royal Geographic Society, Galton proposed leading an exploring expedition to Damaraland (present day Namibia), hoping to push from Walfish Bay inland to Lake Ngami, a lake which had been seen by Europeans only by David Livingstone. Galton failed in this attempt, but his account of that arduous journey, Tropical South Africa (London, 1853), established him as an important explorer and earned him the gold medal of the Royal Geographic Society in 1853, the gold medal of the French Geographical Society in 1854, and election to the Royal Society in 1856. Despite having earned an enviable reputation as an explorer, Damaraland would be Galton's final expedition. Instead, he threw himself into a variety of scientific pursuits, and above all into quantitative inference. As an early experimental psychologist, he introduced the survey as a method for data collection, helped to demonstrate that different minds worked in different ways, promoted twin studies, and investigated the nature of memory and the senses. In meteorology, his work on atmospheric circulation (including coining the word "anticyclone") and his use of maps to show high pressure areas were both fundamental to the development of scientific weather forecasting. Although never as adept mathematically as he would have liked, Galton became a pioneer in the use of regression analysis during the 1870s and introduced the concept of statistical correlation in 1888. Using this approach, he helped to demonstrate that fingerprints were an index of personal identity, even persuading Scotland Yard to keep fingerprint records, and he stirred up a statistical controversy with a study that disproved the efficacy of prayer in healing. He also took on important administrative responsibilities: from 1868 to 1900 he served on the council of the Meteorological Office, and from 1863 to 1867 he was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Galton's best known work, however, was inspired by his cousin. Within months of reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Galton became a zealous convert and almost immediately set out to give statistical heft to the study of differences in human abilities. Struck by the tendency of genius to run in families (including his own), he amassed data on the heritability of intelligence, collecting the genealogies and obituaries of dozens of eminent persons and spinning the results into a succession of books. Hereditary genius: an enquiry into its laws and consequences (1869) was followed by English men of science: their nature and nurture (1874), Natural inheritance (1889), Index to achievements of near kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society (1904), and Noteworthy Families (1906). In each of these, Galton argued that hereditary, not environment, was the key factor in explaining the distribution of intellectual (and other) talents in society. It was he who developed the catch phrase, "nature versus nurture," with the emphasis clearly on nature. As early as 1865, Galton sought to turn his understanding of heredity actively to improve the human race, an idea he popularized in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), the book in which he introduced the term eugenics. He intended this neologism to refer to the scientific effort to improve the human race through selective breeding of the best elements of society and discouragement of breeding of the worst. In his autobiography, Galton wrote that the aims of eugenics were simple and clear, and were rooted in biology. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock. To produce better quantitative data for the analysis of heredity, Galton established an anthropometric laboratory in association with the International Health Exhibition of 1884-1885, and in 1904, he helped establish the human heredity laboratory at the University College London that bears his name. Infirm during the last several years of his life, Galton died of acute bronchitis on Jan. 17, 1911. His wife Louisa Jane Butler, whom he married in August 1853, died in 1897, and he had no children. The bulk of his estate was left to the University College London to endow the laboratory of eugenics and to establish a chair in eugenics, of which the statistician Karl Pearson was the first tenant.

The Galton Collection is a miscellaneous assemblage of 15 letters and one photocopy written by Francis Galton to a variety of correspondents. These letters reflect Galton's research in meteorology, statistics, and, to a lesser degree, the heredity of intelligence.

Provenance

Acquired variously, 1967-1987 (accn. nos. 1967-1254ms, 1975-317ms, 1975-687.1ms, 1975-578f.ms, 1976-1327-1328ms, 1977-1298ms, 1977-603fms, 1978-1345ms, 1987-525ms).

Preferred citation

Cite as: Francis Galton Collection, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Recatalogued by rsc, 2004.

Related material

Galton appears as a correspondent in several APS collections, including the Moore Autograph Collection (3 items), the John Edward Gray Papers (1 item), Paget Papers (4 items), the Letters of Scientists Collection (1 item), the Charles B. Davenport Papers, and the APS Archives (1 item), and he appears in the History of Science Microfilm 1 (Royal Society)

The major manuscript collections for Francis Galton appear at the University College London and the Royal Geographic Society.

Bibliography

The APS has many of Galton's major published works, including:

Genetics Note

This collection contains materials which relate to the history of genetics.

• Clarke, Hyde, 1815-1895
• Frere, Henry Bartle Edward, 18
• Galton, Francis, Sir, 1822-1911
• Jebb, Henry Gladwyn
• Miller, W. J. C. (William John
• Proctor, Annie
• Ravenstein, Ernest, 1834-1913
• Strachey, Richard, Sir, 1817-1908

• Eugenics
• Heredity
• Meteorology