The Biographer's Tale (25 page)

In the test of the
Eye and Hair Colours
Galton used artificial glass eyes respectively dark blue, blue, grey, dark grey, brown grey (green, light hazel), brown, dark brown, black. He also used standard samples of hair: flaxen, light brown, dark brown, black and 3 shades of red: fair red (golden), red, dark red (chestnut auburn). He was certainly the first to introduce standard scales of this kind, and, what is more, to realise the difficulty of reproducing them. Such eye and hair scales are common
enough now, but were by no means so in 1882, yet the difficulty remains of reproducing them accurately even when manufactured by one firm. The glass eyes of the two standard scales are found not to have the same types of pigments in them, and the spunglass silk used for standard hair scales not always the same amount of dye.

Galton felt keenly the need for a standard and permanent set of colours, and made a suggestion on this point of great value. In 1869 he had been struck by the great variety of permanent colours which are produced for mosaic work. He had been over the
Fabbrica
of mosaics attached to the Vatican and seen their 25,000 numbered trays or bins of coloured mosaic. He realised at once the opportunity thus afforded not only for the establishment of a general colour scale in this country, but, as the mosaics were manufactured for the representation of human figures among other things, for skin, hair and eye-colour scales for anthropometric purposes.

I beg to propose that the authorities of the South Kensington Art Department should make application to the Pope for mosaic tablets containing in order specimens of each of their 25,000 bins to be suspended in the Museum for the purpose of reference as a standard of colour …

It might be disposed as a frieze running along the
wall at a height convenient for reference, the bits of mosaic perhaps arranged in tablets of 100 containing ten ranks and ten files, with dark lines at the 5th division each way for convenience of immediately ascertaining the number appertaining to each several bit …

It might well be a subject for the subsequent consideration of the authorities of South Kensington whether they should not select by means of the large amount of skill and science at their disposal say one tenth of the Vatican series to create what might be called a South Kensington scale of colours, and distribute identical copies of it in mosaic, which would occupy a space according to the above calculation of less than 10 feet X 8 feet among the art schools of the United Kingdom.

Sixteen
years later (1886) Galton returned to his suggestion impressed by the fading of the original paintings of Broca for skin tints, and by a further brief stay in Rome where he had again visited the Vatican factory … He now found that there were 40,000 bins of mosaics, and of these 10,762 were classified; they occupied 24 cases in each of which were 16 rows of 28 samples. The flesh tints appropriate to European nations were about 500 in number, so that the Vatican factory provided ample material for the selection of a series of tints such as anthropologists desired …

Mr. Odo Russell—later Lord Ampthill—our semiofficial representative at the Vatican (till 1870) was ultimately asked to inquire as to the feasibility of carrying
out the scheme, “but the price asked by the Papal government was altogether excessive, and so the matter dropped.”

Among matters which concern us in this chapter are standards for hair and eye colours. Here Galton directly suggests “glass spun by a glass blower for comparison with hair.” Thus before 1886 he had proposed sets of standard glass eyes, mosaics for skin colour and spun glass for hair; all 3 of these suggestions have been carried out in this century—by Germans—in the well-known eye-scale of Professor R. Martin, in Professor von Luschau's skin-scale and Professor G. Fischer's glass-silk hair scale. Thus the best of what we can do
now
, was suggested by Galton twenty to thirty years earlier.

Vasa Order. Medjidjie Order (Turkish) Commander Third Class, Danebrog, Order of St. Olaf, Knight, Saxe
Ernestine Order, Knight First Class, honorary doctorate Uppsala, Order of St. Olaf Commander First Class, Great Cross of St. Olaf, Great Cross of Dannebrog Order, Great Cross of North Star.

Voice from the grave to her who was my dear wife
.

1. The two herbaria in the Museum
   . Let neither rats nor moths damage them. Let no naturalist steal a single plant. Take great care who is shown them. Valuable though they already are, they will be worth more as time goes on. They are the greatest collection the world has ever seen. Do not sell them for less than a thousand ducats. My son is not to have them because he never helped me in botany and does not love the subject; keep them for some son-in-law who may prove to be a botanist.
   
2. The shell cabinet
   is worth at least 12,000 dalers.
   
3. The insect cabinet
   cannot be kept for long, because of moth.
   
4. The mineral cabinet
   contains things of great value.
   
5. The library in my museums
   with all my books, is worth at least 3,000 copper dalers. Do not sell it, but give it to the Uppsala library. But my son may have my library in Uppsala at a valuation.
   

CL

You would have admired, enjoyed,—yes, quite fallen in love with his museum, to which all his students had access.

On one wall was his Lapp dress and other curiosities; on another side were big objects of the vegetable kingdom and a collection of mussels, and on the remaining two, his medical books, his scientific instruments, and his minerals. In a corner of the room, which was a high one, were the branches of a tree in which lived about thirty different kinds of tame birds, and in the window recesses stood great pots, filled with earth, for growing rare plants. It was a joy, too, to look at his collection of pressed plants, all gummed on sheets of paper; there were more than three thousand Swedish plants, both wild and cultivated, as well as many rarities from Lapland. Further, there were a thousand species of Swedish insects and about the same number of Swedish stones, tastefully displayed in spacious boxes and arranged according to the entirely new system founded on his own observations.

James Edward Smith. 26 large chests. 19,000 sheets of pressed plants. 3,200 insects. 1,500 shells. 700–800 pieces of coral. 2,500 mineral specimens. 2,500 books. 3,000 letters (to and from). various mss.

Instruments designed by FG. Anthropometric, psychometric, meteorological et al. Many unidentified devices, and drawings of devices, whose purpose may now only be divined are collectively known in the Anthropometric Laboratory as Galton's Toys.

Drill pantograph. Weather balloon. A lock. A lamp. A balance. A printing telegraph. A device for compounding six objects. A hyperscope. A wave engine. A heliostat. A “Tactor” machine. A machine for optical combination of images. An Iceland spar compounder. A measurement of resemblance machine. An instantaneous attitude snapper. Spectacles for divers. Whistles for high notes. A Pocket registrator. An instrument for testing the perception of tint differences. An instrument for measuring the movement of a limb.

The substitutes for thread, string and cord are as follows:—Thongs cut spirally, like a watch spring out of a
piece of leather or hide, and made pliant by working them round a stick; sinew and catgut; inner bark of trees—this is easily separated by long steeping in water, but chewing it is better; roots of trees, as the spruce-fir, split to the proper size; woodbines, runners, or pliant twigs twisted together. Some seaweeds—the only English one of which I have heard is the common olive-green weed called
Chorda filum;
it looks like a whip-thong, and sometimes grows to a length of thirty or forty feet; when half-dried, the skin is taken off and twisted into fishing-lines etc. Hay-bands; horsehair ropes, or even a few twisted hairs from the tail of a horse; the stems of numerous plants afford fibres that are more or less effective substitutes for hemp, those that are used by the natives of the country visited should be noticed; “Indian grass” is an animal substance attached to the ovaries of small sharks and some other fish of the same class.

In lashing things together with twigs, hay-bands, and the like, the way of securing the loose ends is
not by
means of a knot, which usually causes them to break, but by twisting the ends together until they “kink.” All faggots and trusses are secured in this way.

Samuel John Galton (1753–1832) was very fond of animals. He kept many blood hounds; he loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in 3 small volumes, with illustrations. He had a decidedly statistical bent, loving to arrange all kinds of data in
parallel lines of corresponding lengths, and frequently using colour for distinction. My father, and others of Samuel Galton's children, inherited this taste in a greater or lesser degree; it rose to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on that account, as the number of expensively bound volumes that she ordered from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and must have it still; the rest were destroyed. She must have collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason, but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that endeared her to her nephews and nieces.