Owing to this and subsequent work in connection therewith he was in 1856 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.Įarly in the ’sixties he began his studies in heredity, and in 1865 an article on “Hereditary Talent and Character” was published in Macmillan's Magazine, which clearly set out his views on a department of applied anthropology, he afterwards named Eugenics, Through his strenuous advocacy, eugenics is now beginning to exercise an important influence on social reform in all civilised countries. In 1850 he organised an expedition to explore Damaraland, the scientific results of which were so valuable, that in 1853 the Royal Geographical Society awarded him one of its annual gold medals. The study of these more or less exact sciences, must have exercised a great influence in impelling him to work out exact methods in that study of the mental and physical characters of man, which occupied almost exclusively the last forty years of his life. Galton’s early studies were devoted to medicine and later to mathematics, he having entered Birmingham Hospital as a medical student in 1838, and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1840. No one appreciated better than Galton himself the benefits he derived from natural inheritance, the laws and importance of which he has done so much to elucidate. On the father’s side he was come of a good Quaker stock, some members of which, as for example the famous Captain Barclay of Ury, were of exceptionally fine physique. Galton had the advantage of belonging to a stock of great intellectual distinction his grandfather on the mother’s side being the celebrated Erasmus Darwin, and his cousin the still more distinguished Charles Darwin. Born, FebruDied, JanuBy John Gray, B.Sc.īy the death of Sir Francis Galton, British science has lost one of its most original and creative thinkers, and the loss is especially great to anthropology, which he may be said to have elevated, for the first time, to the rank of an exact science.
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