Galton, FRANCIS, F.R.S.

Galton, FRANCIS, F.R.S., grandson of Dr Erasmus Darwin, and cousin of Charles Darwin, was born at Duddeston in 1822, and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. He studied medicine at the Birmingham Hospital and King's College, London, and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. Having in 1846 travelled in North Africa, he explored in 1850 lands hitherto unknown in South Africa, publishing his experiences in his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, which obtained the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and in Art of Travel, which passed through five editions between 1855 and 1872. His investigations in meteorology are recorded in Meteorographica, published in 1863. A member of a Meteorological Committee of the Board of Trade, he was appointed one of the committee entrusted with the parliamentary grant for the Meteorological Office. Latterly he has specially devoted himself to the problem of heredity, publishing Hereditary Genius: its Laws and Consequences (1869); Experiments in Pangensis (1871); English Men of Science: their Nature and Nurture (1874); Life-history Album (1884); Natural Inheritance (1889), &c. He was general secretary of the British Association, 1863-68; President of the Anthropological Sections, 1877 and 1885; President of the Anthropological Institute, 1885-86.