ed by Galton, and for which he seems to have been taken to task.

With regard to the machinery of reproduction the essay is remarkable for
containing what is practically identical with Weismann's continuity of
the germ-cell, and Galton's priority is acknowledged by that author. But
in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the
man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new
and precious quality, but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and
feeds the world on it. This is true of this very _Macmillan's Magazine_
article. Who would know of these admirable views on Hereditary Genius
and Eugenics, if this were Galton's only utterance? This is the grain
which has increased and multiplied: and it is to-day familiar nutriment,
and is now assiduously cultivated by the Eugenics Education Society. But
if _Natural Inheritance_, and _Hereditary Genius_ had not been written;
if the papers on eugenics had not appeared, and especially if he had not
convinced the world of his seriousness by creating a eugenic foundation
at University College, where his friend Professor Karl Pearson carries on
the Galtonian traditions--why then the paper in _Macmillan_ would have
counted for very little. But it was not quite unnoticed. By my father
it is referred to in the _Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication_. Galton was encouraged and reassured by Darwin's
appreciation of his work: his words in _Hereditary Genius_ {25} are, "I
feel assured that, inasmuch as what I then wrote was sufficient to earn
the acceptance of Mr. Darwin . . . the increased amount of evidence
submitted in the present volume is not likely to be gainsaid." He was
characteristically generous in owning his debt to the author of the
_Origin of Species_, and characteristically modest in the value he
ascribed to my father's words.

The book on Hereditary Genius strikes me as most impressive. It seems as
though the man whom the world had agreed to honour as an admirable and
indeed a brilliant worker in geography and meteorology had suddenly grown
big. He shows himself to have the power of sustaining a weighty argument
in strong and temperate phrase, speaking as judge rather than advocate,
and to have definitely taken rank with Darwin, Lyell, Hooker and Huxley,
men whose pens have dinted the world, leaving their ineffaceable mark on
the road trodden by the march of science.

When I was working at the _Life