Francis Galton and Eugenics
Darwin’s cousin in the nineteenth century, writes C.H. Corning, was a daring explorer of the world and a pioneer in the scientific study of racial qualities.
Shortly after the publication of Darwin’s monumental On the Origin of Species in 1859, an outraged clergyman labelled its retiring author ‘the most dangerous man in England’. Darwin’s receptive younger cousin, Francis Galton, felt differently:
‘I always think of you,’ he wrote, ‘in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of their superstition... the appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought.’
Galton’s tribute was no mere flattery. Already a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of an African exploring expedition, Galton was drawn by Darwin’s great insight into a vast and virgin field of exploration, where even the master hesitated to tread - the importance and implications for the human race of the Theory of Evolution.
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