he found the Royal Geographical Society meetings good hunting-ground for
fidgets, for as Francis Galton remarks, "Even there, dull memoirs are
occasionally read."

Nor must I forget his plan of marking, by means of a hidden apparatus,
the beauty of the women he met in the streets of different towns. He
classified them as pretty, ugly, and indifferent; in this beauty
competition London came out at the top; Aberdeen, I regret to say, was at
the bottom.

But in considering the measurement of human faculty we have got quite out
of any reasonably chronological sequence, for the book bearing that title
appeared in 1883. But the estimation of human characteristics,
especially in relation to heredity, was in Galton's mind several years
earlier, and in 1865 he wrote the two papers in _Macmillan's Magazine_
which contain the germs of his later work on heredity and eugenics. It
is unfortunate that the research on heredity, together with its practical
application to human welfare in the new science of eugenics, should not
have more space given to it in his autobiographical _Memories_; there are
but thirty-seven pages--or 11 per cent. of the whole book. The specific
importance of the subjects here dealt with is so great that these
thirty-seven pages outweigh all the rest of the book. We should like to
have had a fuller account by the author of this remarkable work of 1865.
He does, however, tell us--and it is a very striking statement--that the
two articles "expressed then, as clearly as I can do now, the leading
principles of Eugenics."

The chief point in which he came to differ from the _Macmillan_ articles
was that he was then "too much disposed to think of marriage under some
regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social
and religious sentiment." I imagine that the pendulum has now swung the
other way, and that one of the most hopeful and practical schemes is the
prevention of marriage among habitual criminals and the feeble-minded.

Galton attributes his work in heredity in some measure to the publication
of the _Origin of Species_, which, he says, "made a marked epoch" in his
"mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally."

That Galton personally felt no difficulty in assimilating the new
doctrine, he characteristically ascribes to a "bent of mind that both its
illustrious author" and himself had "inherited from" their "common
grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin." But in