our day the name of Galton is
intimately connected in our minds with the science of heredity, and we
forget that he, like lesser men, was a mine fired by the _Origin_. He
was "encouraged," he says, "by the new views to pursue many inquiries
which had long interested" him "which clustered round the central topics
of heredity." This was the charge with which the mine had been
loaded--the _Origin_ was the fuse.

When that book was published in 1859, nearly everyone here to-night must
have been too young to know anything of the great change in the colour of
human thought which was ushered in. There are more who may remember how
twelve years later, when the _Descent of Man_ came out, there was still
plenty of clerical and other forms of foolish bitterness. But a man
needs to have been in the full swing of mental activity in 1859 to
perceive the greatness of the change due to the _Origin of Species_.

His two papers in _Macmillan's Magazine_, 1865 (Vol. XII., pp. 157 and
318), seem to me very remarkable, and, as I have said, they are passed
over too lightly by the author in his _Memories_ (p. 310). They contain
a statistical proof of the inheritance of intellectual and moral
qualities. {23} And those who would allow the truth of this statement
must further agree that it is the first statistical demonstration of this
important fact that the world has seen. And he insists that the whole
spiritual nature of man is heritable, so that in his opinion there are no
traces of that new element, "specially fashioned in Heaven," which (he
says) is commonly believed to be given to a baby at its birth.

The paper contains a very interesting discussion on the development of
social virtues by natural selection. He gives, too, a characteristic
explanation of that human attribute commonly known as Original Sin, the
quality, in fact, which makes men yield to base desires against and in
spite of their sense of what is right. He says {24} that here "the
development of our nature under Darwin's law of natural selection has not
yet overtaken the development of our religious civilisation." It may be
more briefly described as the conflict between the individual desires
with the tribal instincts. It must be remembered that for all this
discussion Galton had no _Descent of Man_ to guide him.

I shall come back later to his clear and courageous statement of eugenics
in 1865. Meanwhile I must speak of heredity, a word, by the way,
introduc