wondering whether patients might not with advantage be made drunk
before operations--a query which was to be happily answered by the
discovery of anaesthetics.

Another characteristic event was his attempt to learn the properties of
all the drugs in the pharmacopoeia by personal experience. He determined
to dose himself alphabetically, but got no further than C., for the
effects of croton oil put a stop to his thirst for first-hand knowledge.

We must pass over his time at King's College, London, where, as he sat at
lecture, he could see the "sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on
the Thames," a vision which stirred his blood with a longing for
adventure, and which, as he characteristically noticed, always occurred
when the weather-cock on the Horse Guards showed that the south-west wind
was blowing.

We must, in like manner, skip his undergraduate days at Trinity,
Cambridge. We thus arrive by a devious route at the period when he
returned a traveller and geographer of recognized merit, and began the
work with which he was practically connected for many years, as a member
of the Meteorological Committee. His best-known contribution in the
science was in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1862, where his
discovery of the anticyclone was first described; but he also had a good
deal to do with the printing and publishing of the now familiar weather
charts. Meteorology takes us from 1861 to 1863, that is nearly to 1865,
when his first paper on heredity appeared, which was at the same time his
first paper on hereditary genius. This line of research was to form his
chief claim to celebrity and must be separately treated.

Meanwhile I wish to say something of his love of experiment, which is a
branch of his devotion to method. We know something of the more
entertaining of his inquiries from his delightful book of _Memories_, yet
I cannot but fear that he has left out many experiments even stranger
than those he publishes. My father had a special affection for what in
his own case he called "Fool's experiments." These are what, I am
afraid, Galton may have omitted. Still there are records of some
delightful lines of work. He is probably the only man who ever attempted
to solve by experiment the problem of free will and determinism. He
limited his inquiry to the question--whether there exists in human
affairs such a thing as an "uncaused and creative action." The
experiment, or rather self-observation,