a bore
than Francis Galton.

He first appeared on the literary and scientific stage as a traveller,
geographer, and author of a book on South Africa (1853), and it was the
experience there gained that enabled him to write two years later, in
1855, that wonderful book, _The Art of Travel_. There he teaches such
vitally important things as how to find water, how to train oxen as pack
animals, to pitch a tent, to build a fire, to cook, and a thousand other
secrets.

He liked, of course, to be useful to weary and thirsty travellers, but he
was as much, or more, impelled by the love of method for its own sake.
He was in fact an artist in method. The same thing is shown in a letter
he wrote to Nature near the end of his life, explaining how to cut a cake
on scientific principles so that it shall not become stale. This again
was not so much a philanthropic desire that his fellow men should not
have dry cake, as delight in method.

When I re-read _The Art of Travel_ quite recently, I could not find his
method of preventing a donkey braying. My recollection is that,
observing a braying donkey with tail erect, he argued that if the tail
were forcibly kept down, as by tying a stone to it, the braying would not
occur. I certainly believe myself to have read or heard that this most
Galtonian plan succeeded.

Later in life he tried to make his unique knowledge of value to his
country. He writes: {15}

"The outbreak of the Crimean War showed the helplessness of our soldiers
in the most elementary matters of camp-life. Believing that something
could be done by myself towards removing this extraordinary and culpable
ignorance, I offered to give lectures on the subject, gratuitously, at
the then newly-founded camp at Aldershot."

He received no answer from the War Office, but a personal application to
Lord Palmerston led to his being installed. He speaks of a few officers
attending his course, and adds that the "rude teachings of the Crimean
War soon superseded" his own.

In relation to what I have been speaking of, I must here be allowed to
turn back to an earlier period of his life. In illustrating the
different dispositions of his sisters, both of whom were dear to him,
Galton writes:

"My eldest sister was just, my youngest merciful. When my bread was
buttered for me as a child, the former picked out the butter that filled
the big holes, the latter did not. Consequently I respected the former,
and loved the latt