So who is this? He had ‘a massive figure with a prominent stomach and a jowly face surmounted by a majestic nose’. He stammered. His cheeks were ‘pitted with old craters and scars’, and he walked with a limp after his carriage had pitched him into the road. All in all he travelled about ‘10,000 miles a year seeing patients’, but declined George III’s invitation to attend the royal personage and discuss that man’s perplexing ailments. His locality of Derbyshire held more appeal. A first marriage gave him five children, two of whom died young, before this wife died at 30, ‘possibly from liver disease exacerbated by alcohol’. Next came two illegitimate daughters, and then a determined courtship of a married woman with three children. Fortunately – for this proposed liaison – the husband died, enabling another marriage to take place which produced five sons and two daughters.

Similarly who is this? At school he received frequent caning but, as he himself recorded, ‘learnt nothing’. While studying medicine he toured European hospitals, and saw an ancient reptile jawbone, but was unimpressed ‘by all that sort of fossil nonsense’. Later, at Cambridge, he created a ‘gumption-reviver’ which dripped water on his head to repel tiredness. Even with this assistance he only made third class in the mathematics examinations. He was told not to bother taking the scholarship exams seriously as he was unlikely to receive one. Soon he was dropping out, expecting to be absent for the rest of that year. What followed was not so much a gap period of a few months because, one way and another, six fallow years were to follow before he ‘once more regained a sense of purpose’. By then he was 27.

The two men thus detailed in Gillham’s book are now known as two of the brightest gems in the intellectual firmament. The first was Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the second, namely Francis Galton. Many a youngster, short of a rudder in life, could well take comfort from Galton’s early adult years, most ably described in this exhaustive history of the man.

Basically Galton drifted. First stop was Malta, and then Egypt where he wished to shoot big game. Carelessly he once mistook a cow for a hippo and shot it, as he seemingly shot most creatures to come his way. Hence immediate departure from the owner’s area. Soon, in Aden and no less careless of female companionship, he was physically regretting one such indulgence. Near Tripoli in the Lebanon he camped near foetid water, and contracted a fever to plague him for several years. A servant then contracted dysentery and died, causing great demands for restitution to arrive from that man’s wife and family. Once again Galton speedily absented himself, and was soon in quarantine at Marseilles.

This traveller was plainly courageous, and living life fully, but was still far from the individual which the name of Galton brings to mind. As Gillham tells of the fallow years which accompanied Galton’s youth he lacked ‘a mental compass to direct his future’. Earlier he had even consulted a phrenologist hoping that the resulting personality profile would steer him in the right direction. The investigator gave him, according to the one whose bumps were being examined, a ‘very true character, (with) self-esteem being remarkably full’. The ‘rudderless years’, as Gillham also names them, embarrassed Galton, who later wrote: ‘I was (apparently) leading a very idle life, but it was not so. I read a good deal all the time, and digested what I read by much thinking about it. It has always been my unwholesome way of work to brood much at irregular times.’

Aged 27 Galton then embarked upon his most serious expedition, this embracing Namibia in southern Africa. It would last for three years, with the explorer intending ‘to have some worthy object as a goal and to do more than amuse myself’. Part One of his paper describing these travels was read before the Royal Geographical Society while he was still on his way back home. This account acknowledged that the Society and his African journey had transformed him from fun-loving idler to serious scientist, and he was to stay that way for his remaining 59 years.

Nicholas Gillham’s book is formidable. Within its 357 pages of text and its 57 further pages of notes, bibliography and index, a reader can wonder if there in any Galton fact which has not been incorporated. The detail is intense, and a reader can also wonder, certainly unfairly, what happened to Giliham’s professorial duties (at Duke University) when fulfilling the task he had set himself. The book is a fine read, is never indigestible (despite its plethora of information), and makes one even more astonished at its subject’s mammoth range of interests and the insatiable curiosity which he applied so steadfastly to every one of them.

Anthony Smith