MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
Francis Galton
MEMORIES OF
MY LIFE
BY
FRANCIS GALTON, F.R.S.
D.C.L., OXF.; HON. SC.D., CAMB.
HON. FELLOW TRINITY COLL., CAMBRIDGE
WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1908
PREFACE
These “Memories” are arranged under the subjects to which they refer, and only partially in chronological order. A copious list of my memoirs will be found in the Appendix with dates attached to them. These show what inquiries were going on at or about any specified year. The titles of books are printed in heavy letters. They summarise, as a rule, the best parts of the corresponding memoirs up to the dates of their publication. Nevertheless, a considerable quantity of matter remains in the memoirs as yet unused in that way.
It has been a difficulty throughout to determine how much to insert and how much to omit. I have done my best, but fear I have failed through over-omission.
The method of that most useful volume, the Index and Epitome of the Dictionary of the National Biography, has been adopted, of adding to each name the dates of birth and death. They serve for identification and for giving a correct idea of the age of each man as compared with those with whom he was associated. The dates are mostly taken from the Dictionary, so the reader will nearly always find in that work a biography of the person in question.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. PARENTAGE 1
II. CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD 13
III. MEDICAL STUDIES 22
IV. SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST 48
V. CAMBRIDGE 58
VI. EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN—(map) 83
VII. SYRIA 101
VIII. HUNTING AND SHOOTING 110
IX. SOUTH-WEST AFRICA—(map) 121
X. LANDS OF THE DAMARAS, OVAMPO, AND NAMAQUAS 138
XI. AFTER RETURN HOME—MARRIAGE 152
XII. “ART OF TRAVEL” 161
XIII. SOCIAL LIFE—(medallions) 169
XIV. GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA 198
XV. BRITISH ASSOCIATION 213
XVI. KEW OBSERVATORY AND METEOROLOGY—(meteorological tracings) 224
XVII. ANTHROPOMETRIC LABORATORIES 244
XVIII. COMPOSITE PORTRAITS AND STEREOSCOPIC MAPS 259
XIX. HUMAN FACULTY 266
XX. HEREDITY 287
XXI. RACE IMPROVEMENT—(Galtonia Candicans) 310
APPENDIX.—BOOKS AND MEMOIRS BY THE AUTHOR 325
PRINCIPAL AWARDS AND DEGREES 331
INDEX 332
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT Frontispiece From the Painting by C. W. FURSE, A.R.A.
PORTRAIT Facing p. 244 From a Photograph.
IN THE TEXT PAGE
EGYPT AND SYRIA 88
DAMARALAND 129
YEARLY MEDALLIONS 196
METEOROLOGICAL TRACINGS 237
GALTONIA CANDICANS 323
MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE
Birthplace—Grandparents—Dr. Erasmus Darwin—Lunar Society—Captain Barclay Allardice—Mrs. Schimmelpenninck
Just before the arrival of the letter in which my publisher asked me to write the memories of my life, I happened to be reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV. and laughing over Falstaff’s soliloquy after the gross exaggerations by Justice Shallow of his own youthful performances. It contained the sentence, “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!” Feeling the truth of his ejaculation, I headed the first page of my memorandum-book with those words as a warning, knowing how difficult it is to be veracious about long-past events, threads of imagination insinuating themselves among those supplied by memory and becoming indistinguishable from them.
Many old notebooks and letters are, however, in my possession which have helped me; but my two latest surviving sisters, whose minds were sure storehouses of family events, and to whom I always referred whenever I wanted a date or particulars of a long-past fact, are now both dead, the one at the age of ninety-three and the other at ninety-seven, each with a clear and vigorous mind to nearly the very end of her life. I have hardly any contemporary friends left who could aid in recalling the circumstances of my childhood and boyhood. With rare exceptions, “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
I was born on February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, with which town my father Samuel Tertius, my grandfather Samuel John, and my great-grandfather Samuel Galton, were all closely connected. Different members of the family had resided or were resident at various points beyond the circumference of the town, in houses then amidst green fields, but now overspread beyond recognition by its hideous outskirts.
My grandfather’s place was at Duddeston, then commonly written “Dudson.” Its gardens had been charmingly laid out by my great-grandfather and improved by my grandfather. The house, which was once a centre of refined entertainment, gradually lost its charm of isolation; later on, it wholly ceased to be attractive as a residence. It was then leased by my father to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, because, as he remarked, no one in his senses would live in it. It is now turned into St. Anne’s School, with its porticoes and other outer adornments shorn off, and with its once beautiful gardens changed into the sites of railway sidings and gasworks. I remember it distinctly in its beauty in the year 1830, which was two years before my grandfather’s death.
The Larches, where I was born, had some three acres of garden and field attached to it, with other fields beyond; it was a paradise for my childhood. Its site is now covered with small houses. The two fine larches that flanked it gave me a love for that tree, which persists and is still recognisably associated with its origin.
My six nearest progenitors, namely the two parents and four grandparents, were markedly different in temperament and tastes, and they have bequeathed very different combinations of them to their descendants. I can only partly touch on these.
My grandfather, Samuel John Galton (1753-1832), was a scientific and statistical man of business. He was a Fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose members met at one another’s houses on the day and night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select as to include Priestley, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Keir the chemist, Withering the botanist, Watt, and Boulton. Full particulars of the Lunar Society are to be found in Smiles’ Life of Boulton, and elsewhere.
I may mention that the late Sir Rowland Hill, of penny-postage fame, told me that the event which first gave him a taste for science was the present of a small electrical machine made to him when a boy, by my grandfather.
Samuel John Galton was very fond of animals. He kept many bloodhounds; he loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in three 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 John Galton’s children, inherited this taste in a greater or less 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 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.
Samuel John Galton was a successful man of business. He was a manufacturer, and became a contractor on a large scale for the supply of muskets to the army during the great war. Birmingham offered at that time a good field for the business of a contractor, because its manufactories were many and of moderate size, and central organisations were wanting. The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for steam-engines were almost the only large works at that time. My grandfather prospered in his business as a “Captain of Industry,” to use the phrase applied to him in a book treating of Birmingham. He founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually brought to a close some few years after the war had ceased. He died in 1832, leaving a fortune of some £12,000 a year, of which about a quarter went to each of his three sons, of whom my father was the eldest, and the rest between his three daughters.
The Galton family had been Quakers for many generations. They came to Birmingham from Somersetshire, in the time of my great-grandfather, Samuel Galton (1720-1799). Some of its earlier members are buried at Yatton. There is a hamlet in Dorsetshire called Galton, adjacent to Owre Moigne, with which one at least of our name, and apparently a far back relative, was connected many generations ago.
My grandmother Galton (1757-1817) was also of Quaker stock, being daughter of Robert Barclay of Ury, a descendant of Robert Barclay (1648-1690) “the Apologist,” as he used to be named from his work, Barclay’s Apology, which, to quote the Dictionary of National Biography, is the standard exposition of the tenets of his sect, of which the essential principle is that “all true knowledge comes from divine revelation to the heart of the individual.”
My grandmother’s half-brother, Robert Barclay Allardice (1779-1854), commonly known as “Captain Barclay,” was a noted athlete and pedestrian, and in later years an active agriculturist. When upwards of seventy years old he was dining at my father’s house in Leamington, and on being asked, while sitting at dessert, whether he still performed any feats of strength, he asked my eldest brother, then a fully adult man of more than 12 stone in weight, to step on his hand, which he laid palm upwards on the floor by slightly bending his body. My brother was desired to steady himself by laying one finger on Captain Barclay’s shoulder, who thereupon lifted and landed him on the table. I was not present at the feat, but heard it often described by word and gesture. However, the Captain rather strained his shoulder by performing it, as he confessed to my father afterwards. Captain Barclay’s endurance of long continued fatigue was exceptional to a very high degree. The memoirs of his life are well worth reading.
My grandmother’s half-sister was wife of Hudson Gurney (1775-1864), “antiquary and verse writer, friend of Lord Aberdeen,” to again quote the Index to the Dict. Nat. Biog. He was a man of large fortune, and my two sisters, Bessy and Emma, paid long visits to his house in St. James’s Square, where his wife was very kind to them, and where they saw much good London society.
My grandfather and grandmother Galton were practically Quakers all their lives, and so was one of their daughters, but the rest of their children fell off and joined the Established Church. Still, we saw not a little of our Quaker relations. A story was current in our family about myself, as a shy and naughty child, being quite subdued by the charm of Mrs. Fry (1780-1845). She did not even look at me, but merely held out her open hand with comfits in it, and went on speaking to others in her singularly sweet voice. I gradually worked my way nearer to her; then she quietly took me on her knees, where I sat for long in perfect content.
My grandparents on the other side were Darwins, my grandfather being Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, poet, and philosopher, and the very reverse of an ascetic or of a Quaker. He was grandfather to me by his second wife; and to Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), the great naturalist, by his first wife. His hereditary influence seems to have been very strong. His son Charles, who died at the early age of twenty from a dissection wound, was a medical student of extraordinary promise; and the medical sagacity of another son, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury, the father of Charles R. Darwin, is amply attested. I stayed for a night or two at the house of the latter while I was a boy and too young to form any opinion of him worth recording; besides, I was rather awe-stricken.
My grandmother Darwin (1747-1832), the second wife of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, was the widow of Colonel E. Sacheverel Chandos-Pole, and, judging from her portrait when young, a lady of remarkable grace and beauty. I saw her in her kindly old age when she lived at the Priory near Derby, but I know little with certainty of her early life and character. She died at the age of eighty-five, her mother at ninety-six. It is perhaps partly through her that the exceptional longevity of my mother and her sons and daughters has been derived. My mother died just short of ninety, my eldest brother at eighty-nine, two sisters, as already mentioned, at ninety-three and ninety-seven respectively; my surviving brother is ninety-three and in good health. My own age is now only eighty-six, but may possibly be prolonged another year or more. I find old age thus far to be a very happy time, on the condition of submitting frankly to its many limitations.
A half-sister of my mother married Captain, afterwards Lord Byron, cousin and successor to the poet in the title. They were very kind to my sisters in their schooldays and after.
Now, as to my two parents and their brothers and sisters. My father, Samuel Tertius Galton (1783-1844), the third in descent of the name of Samuel, was one of the most honourable and kindly of men, and eminently statistical by disposition. He wrote a small book on currency, with tables, which testifies to his taste. He had a scientific bent, having about his house the simple gear appropriate to those days, of solar microscope, orrery, telescopes, mountain barometers without which he never travelled, and so forth. A sliding rule adapted to various uses was his constant companion. He was devoted to Shakespeare, and revelled in Hudibras; he read Tom Jones through every year, and was gifted with an abundance of humour. Nevertheless, he became a careful man of business, on whose shoulders the work of the Bank chiefly rested in troublous times. Its duties had cramped much of the joy and aspirations of his early youth and manhood, and narrowed the opportunity he always eagerly desired, of abundant leisure for systematic study. As one result of this drawback to his own development, he was earnestly desirous of giving me every opportunity of being educated that seemed feasible and right. He was the eldest son.
The second son, Hubert, married a sister of Robert Barclay, the banker. They had three daughters, who all died unmarried—two while young, the other in advanced age.
The youngest son, John Howard, married Isabella Strutt, a lady of considerable fortune, and built Hadzor, near Droitwich, a large house, with much artistic taste. He enjoyed varied society, and made Hadzor an important social centre.
My uncle Howard was father to Sir Douglas Galton, K.C.B. (1822-1899), an eminent authority on engineering, sanitation, and much else. Sir Douglas held a record position in the examination at Woolwich for entry into the Royal Engineers, being first in every subject (see Dict. Nat. Biog.). Curiously enough, though we cousins were both addicted to science, and belonged alike to many scientific societies, and were both Secretaries of the British Association, our paths rarely crossed, except socially, for we were interested in quite different branches of science.
My father’s eldest sister, Mary Anne (1778-1856), was a lady of some note as Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, more briefly known to us by repute as “Aunt Skim.” A most unhappy feud separated her from all the rest of the family. It is not my duty, and it would certainly give me no pleasure, to enter into what the older members of the family conceived to have been frequent and mischievous misrepresentations. I would rather dwell on the facts that she was highly accomplished and handsome, and that she acquired many fast friends, as shown in the Life of the Gurneys of Earlham and in her own Memoirs. Also that she lived in the reputation of much sterling piety at Bristol, and that three of my own friends, of totally different temperaments, who knew her well, and of whom I inquired particularly, all spoke in pleasant memory of her and her eccentric ways. They were Prof. W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) the physiologist, J. Gwyn Jeffreys (1809-1885), conchologist, etc., and Sir Lewis Pelly, K.C.B. (1825-1892), Indian soldier and diplomatist. She wrote a book on Port Royal, and left a valuable library of Port Royalist literature to Sion College, which Mrs. Romanes told me was of great service to her in writing her recent history of that establishment. For more, see Dict. Nat. Biog.
I wish I could have learnt more details than I possess of another brother of my father, Theodore Galton (1784-1810), who left England for the grand tour, picked up many curios in Spain and Greece, and, returning in health from the East, was placed in quarantine at Malta. The quarantine establishment was attacked by the plague; he caught it and it killed him. He had the highest reputation in the family for his natural gifts, mental and bodily. There is a touching notice of him in the Annual Register.
My mother was A. Violetta Darwin (1783-1874). I have heard from older friends, long since passed away, many charming stories of her as a young bride. She, as I understand, had nothing of the Quaker temperament, but was a joyous and unconventional girl. In her later life she formed the centre of our family during thirty years of widowhood, after my father’s comparatively early death at the age of sixty. She was very methodical in her papers and accounts, and a most affectionate mother to myself. One curious faculty of hers deserves record. It was the ease with which she took in mentally, and afterwards reproduced in rough architectural drawing, the arrangement of any house she knew. Her method was to fold a strip of paper by doubling, quartering, and so on, into sixteen portions of equal lengths, and to use this strip of paper as a sixteen-foot scale wherewith to draw her rude but graphic plans. One of her children, my dear sister Lucy Harriot Moilliet (1809-1848), had an exceptional faculty for perspective drawing; she drew elaborate interiors with very little previous instruction.
As to my other brothers and sisters, they were most diverse in character, yet with a certain common resemblance which struck strangers. I shall have occasion to speak more of them later on in the course of my narrative.
The general result of the foregoing is that I acknowledge the debt to my progenitors of a considerable taste for science, for poetry, and for statistics; also that I seem to have received, partly through the Barclay blood, a rather unusual power of enduring physical fatigue without harmful results, of which there is much evidence when I was young. My father had this power in his early manhood, and it was well marked in my eldest brother and in others of the family. I suffer now from bronchitis with occasional asthma, which has been traced to my great-grandfather, Samuel Galton, and has descended in a greater or less degree through all his children who left issue. My father had a strong constitution otherwise, but he suffered terribly from hay asthma, which first attacked him as a youth. I escaped fairly well from any form of it until I was nearly eighty years old; and it is not hay that especially brings it on now, but warm carpeted rooms. There are few apartments more pleasant to most persons to read in than the drawing-room of the Athenæum Club; I know of none that are now more apt to prove distressing to my throat and lungs.
CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD
Sisters and brothers—Sisterly teachings—Schools at Boulogne, Kenilworth, and Birmingham
I was born into a family of four sisters and two brothers, who were older than myself by ages ranging from seven to fourteen years, the brothers being all younger than the sisters. My third sister, Adele, was twelve years my senior. She had spinal curvature, and was obliged to lie all day on her back upon a board, and was thus cut off from the romps and companionship of her sisters, though all were greatly attached to her. She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift, and begged hard to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward, and in her simple way educated herself as best she could, in order to be able to teach me. Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally inspired book, to cultivate memory, to make me learn the merest rudiments of Latin, and above all a great deal of English verse. This she did effectually, and the result was that she believed, and succeeded in making others believe, that I was a sort of infant prodigy.
There exist numerous records of my early performances, and it is certain that I really knew at a very early age a great deal of Scott, of Milton, and of Pope’s translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and that I delighted in what the family nicknamed “spouting” verse. In middle life I feared that I had been an intolerable prig, and cross-questioned many old family friends about it, but was invariably assured that I was not at all a prig, but seemed to “spout” for pure enjoyment and without any affectation; that I often quoted very aptly on the spur of the moment, and that I was a nice little child. My memories become more or less continuous from about the age of five or six, when I was trotted off to live at a dame’s school a mile away. During these and many subsequent years, my sister Adele had the greater share of my heart, and whenever I was at home I stayed by her sofa-side most of the day. My other sisters teased and petted me alternately; they were relatively too old to be really companions.
It is curious how unchangeable characters are: my eldest sister was just, my youngest was merciful. When my bread was buttered for me as a child, the former picked out the butter that filled the big holes, the latter did not. Consequently I respected the former, and loved the latter. A memory of this trifling occurrence remained inseparably connected in my mind with these dear sisters all my life, and I often amused them by referring to it.
My second sister, Lucy, married before I was ten years old. She was bright, lovable, and very original. Her house was like a second home to me during the four years of boyhood that I spent at Birmingham. I have indeed been fortunate in receiving the sisterly affection that has fallen to my lot.
But I must not stop at this period of my reminiscences to speak of other sisters than Adele, with whom my heart was then so intimately associated. I am enormously indebted to the influence of her pious, serene, and resolute disposition. Though she was compelled to pass the greater part of her life lying on her back, she was so energetic in other ways, and so capable of endurance, that she overcame difficulties that would have been insurmountable to most women who were equally handicapped. She was active in setting up schools and teaching the poor. She had a considerable correspondence, and exerted a wide influence among all classes during many years. Her natural capacity was of an unusually high order, and many who knew her well, and whose opinions deserve respect, thought that a slight betterment of opportunity and circumstances might have caused her name to be as widely loved and known as those of any of our English saints or heroines. She passed her life under an abiding sense of the presence of God and of duty to man, without which few persons have ever done great things. She was most unconventional in her ways, and her remarkable courage was recognised by all the family.
She married a clergyman, the Rev. Shirley Bunbury, shortly after my father’s death in 1844, but was left a widow soon afterwards, with one little girl, on whom she lavished the same educational care that she had bestowed upon myself, but with fuller knowledge. That little girl is now in her turn a widow, with a large and grown-up family. She was married in 1866 to John C. Baron Lethbridge of Tregeare, in Cornwall, about six miles west of Launceston.
I think I can revive my principal feelings at that early age with fair correctness, their change during growth seeming to have been chiefly due to the increased range of mental prospect. The horizon of a child is very narrow and his sky very near. His father is the supreme of beings. He has to learn by slow degrees that there are more and more appreciable stages between the highest and the lowest, and the number of such stages that he can discriminate affords a good measure of his mental calibre at the time. It was about the date of which I have been speaking that my second brother, Erasmus, then a boy of twelve or thirteen, entered the navy, and showed himself to us in his uniform, with the dagger or “dirk” that was part of it. I, a child of five or so, fingered it with awe, and with my little head full of Greeks and Trojans looked upon him as a hero, like Achilles, and can perfectly recall my sense of increased security from knowing that England could henceforth avail herself of his puissant arm and terrible weapon.
I lived and throve in what was practically the country until the age of eight, when I was sent to a school at Boulogne, whither my father escorted me. It was erroneously supposed that I should learn French there and acquire a good accent. What I did learn was the detestable and limited patois that my eighty schoolfellows were compelled to speak under penalty of a fine, and in this cruel way. There were transferable metal labels which were called “marks,” and the boys in whose possession these marks remained after each playtime received a bad record whose accumulation up to a certain point entailed punishment. I rebelled with my whole heart against the treachery encouraged by this system. A boy with a “mark” in his pocket would sidle up and encourage you as he best could to say a word of English, then forthwith he clapped his “mark” into your hand, and went away rejoicing at the riddance.
The school was an old convent near to and within the Calais gate of the upper town; the playground was the paved square of the convent, in which we used the flat gravestones for playing marbles. It is now partly overbuilt by the large church whose dome is conspicuous from afar.
We were daily marched off in a long row of pairs, usually for a walk round the ramparts, sometimes to Napoleon’s Column, then in process of building, and in the summer, not infrequently, to bathe by rocks near the old fort. We prepared ourselves for the latter grateful occasions by saving bread from breakfast; then, after having gathered mussels, we spread their delicious contents on it to eat. An opportunity was then afforded of inspecting with awe the marks of recent birchings, which were reckoned as glorious scars. The birchings were frequent and performed in a long room parallel to, and separated from, the schoolroom by large ill-fitting doors, through which each squeal of the victim was heard with hushed breaths. In that room was a wardrobe full of school-books ready for issue. It is some measure of the then naïveté of my mind that I wondered for long how the books could have been kept so fresh and clean for nearly two thousand years, thinking that the copies of Cæsar’s Commentaries were contemporary with Cæsar himself.
An occasional walk was to a wet plantation on the side of the little river Liane, that feeds the harbour, at which one of our schoolfellows, a gaunt, dyspeptic-looking boy, performed the following feat to our terror and admiration, as we crowded round him to see it. He took a frog by its hind feet, opened his wide mouth and dropped the frog’s fore-feet on his tongue. The frog struggled to get free, and at the critical moment the hind legs were let go, and down went the frog, head foremost, into his gullet. He was our hero for the time; none other dared to attempt the same feat. He said that he felt the frog all the way as it went down to his stomach, and in it.
The school was hateful to me in many ways, and lovable in none, so I was heartily glad to be taken away from it in 1832. I thence returned to my family party, who were newly settled in Leamington. It then consisted of my father, mother, and three sisters; my brothers were away, and my other sister, Lucy, who had married, was living near Birmingham. My grandfather Galton had recently died, and the consequent large accession to my father’s income justified his change of residence, which gave him and my sisters a wider social intercourse than they had at the Larches. Leamington was at that time a little place, attractive to many eminent invalids, who drank the waters and consulted Dr. Jephson, then becoming celebrated.
I was next sent to a small private school at Kenilworth, consisting of some half-dozen pupils, where I received much kindness, and breathed the air of unconstraint during three happy years. It was kept by Mr. Attwood, the clergyman of the parish (a near relative of the inventor of “Attwood’s machine,” by which the rate of falling bodies is measured), who, without any pretence of learning, showed so much sympathy with boyish tastes and aspirations that I began to develop freely. Two of my fellow-pupils, Matthew P. Watt and Hugh William Boulton, were brothers. They were grandsons of my grandfather’s friend of the original “Boulton and Watt” firm, and sons of my father’s friend, who carried on the manufactory. Hugh William became an exceptionally handsome and socially favoured Life-Guardsman; he died young. Matthew was then, subsequently at Cambridge, and again for some years afterwards, an object of reverence to me. I have known few or any who seemed to me his natural superiors in breadth and penetration of intellect, but he was cursed with a fortune far in excess of his simple though cultured needs, which exacted duties from him that he hated. His large fortune also removed the stimulus which necessity gives for getting through work and having done with it, instead of lingering indefinitely. He consequently grew amateurish, wasting thought on ingenious paradoxes and literary trifles, and failed to check a natural tendency towards recluseness and some other oddities of disposition. He gained the University prizes for Greek and Latin Epigrams at Cambridge in 1841, but did not care to compete for other honours. His artistic sense was of a high and classical order. His ideal, like that of Goethe, was a uniform culture of all the higher faculties. There was nothing ignoble in his nature. Whenever I talked with him about my own occasional annoyances, they seemed to become petty through his broad way of looking at things, I may almost say under the mere influence of his presence. His photograph, which is near me as I write, testifies to a personality that accords with the grandeur of his character. I owe much to his influence, and still remain conscious of the void in my friendships caused by his death very many years ago.
When I was fourteen years old it became time for me to go to a bigger school. My father had a Quaker’s repugnance to public schools of the usual type, and it was finally decided that I should be sent to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, then commonly known as the “Free School,” to which a headmaster of high attainments had been recently appointed. This was Dr. Jeune (1806-1868), afterwards Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Bishop of Peterborough. I lived as a pupil, together with a few others, at his house by the Five Ways, to which a considerable garden was attached, and whence we walked daily, through a mile or so of street, to and from the school. I retained Dr. Jeune’s friendship until his death, and it was impossible not to recognise his exceptional ability and educational zeal, but the character of the education was altogether uncongenial to my temperament. I learnt nothing, and chafed at my limitations. I had craved for what was denied, namely, an abundance of good English reading, well-taught mathematics, and solid science. Grammar and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for there seemed so little sense in them. I was a fool to have been recalcitrant, and not to have profited by what I could have had, because many of my schoolfellows prospered on the teaching. Three of them, F. Rendal, H. Holden, and C. Evans, were the very first in classics of their respective years at Cambridge. The two first were bracketed as equally deserving the position of Senior Classic, and the third gained that honour unpaired. Still, the literary provender provided at Dr. Jeune’s school disagreed wholly with my mental digestion. The time spent there was a period of stagnation to myself, which for many years I bitterly deplored, for I was very willing and eager to learn, and could have learnt much if a suitable teacher had been at hand to direct and encourage me.
CHAPTER III
MEDICAL STUDIES
First experience—Tour with Mr. Bowman—Birmingham Hospital—Accidents—Sense of pain—King’s College—Professor R. Partridge and others—Escape from drowning
It was strongly desired by both my parents, but especially by my mother, that my future profession should be medicine, like that of her famous father, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, F.R.S., and of her half-brother, Dr. Robert Darwin, F.R.S. As I had aptitudes for that kind of study, my father fell in with her views, and took great pains to give me the best educational advantages. He acted largely on the advice of Mr. Hodgson, who brought me as an infant into the world, and was a true and helpful friend to me all through his life.
Mr. Hodgson (1788-1869) had settled in Birmingham a few years before my birth, bringing with him a high medical reputation, especially for his treatise on arteries and veins, and he soon obtained an eminent status as a Warwickshire surgeon. He became President of the Medico-Chirurgical Society in 1851, and, subsequently retiring from general practice, left Birmingham and settled in London, where he held the office of President of the College of Surgeons in 1864. He and his wife died on the same day in 1869.
While I was still a young boy, my father contrived that I should see something of a laboratory attached to the shop of the principal chemist in Birmingham; again, during one of our summer visits to the seaside, he discovered a needy foreign chemist who agreed to take me in hand, at a rather high charge. All I clearly recollect of him now was, that he seemed obsessed with the idea of making some wonderful compound out of succinic acid, which is derived from amber, and that he spent all his spare shillings in buying bits of amber and burning them. I learnt nothing from his tuition; on the other hand, certain recollections of the chemist’s laboratory still form part of my stock of mental imagery.
The step most momentous to myself was taken by my father in 1838, of removing me at the age of sixteen, and in no ways against my will, from Dr. Jeune’s school.
A little after, while I was at Leamington, my father asked our medical attendant there, Mr. P., to show me an example of the medical work I should be engaged in before I was plunged wholly into it. That first experience is very memorable to me. It occurred on a night chilly out of doors, while indoors our family party were assembled in cosy comfort at dessert, after a good dinner, with a brightly burning fire, shining mahogany table, wine, fruits, and all the rest, when a servant brought a note from Mr. P. awaiting an answer. It was to the effect that a housemaid had suddenly died at Lord ——’s house, and that he, Mr. P., was about to make a post-mortem examination; would I like to come? Oh, the mixture of revulsion, wonder, interest, and excitement! I changed clothes and went, entering the house by a back door as directed, and treading softly up the back staircase to the cold garret where the poor girl lay. She was the first dead person I had seen, handsome in feature, but greatly swollen. She had been apparently in perfect health a few hours before, then she was suddenly seized with intense pain in the stomach, followed rapidly by peritonitis and death. I can easily reproduce in imagination all the ghastly horror of the scene and could describe it in detail, but it would be unfitted for these pages. The perforated portion of the stomach was such a small hole. Death “with a little pin, bores through the castle wall, and—farewell, King!” (King Richard II.). Mr. P. pricked his finger while sewing up the abdomen. A dissection wound when death has followed peritonitis is proverbially dangerous. It was so in this case, for Mr. P. nearly died of it. I returned home chilled, awed and sobered, and seemed for the time to have left boyhood behind me.
My father, ever thoughtful of securing for me the best education he could, had arranged through Mr. Hodgson that one of his most promising former pupils, who was going for a tour of a few weeks abroad, partly for vacation, partly to see certain medical institutions, should take me with him. He was William Bowman, in later years the great oculist, Sir William (1816-1892), who combined a most refined and artistic temperament with exceptional scientific ability. He obtained a European reputation for medical research long before he was thirty years of age. Thenceforward for many years he devoted himself almost entirely to professional work, and though keeping abreast of the information of the day, contributed little or nothing more of his own, in the way of research, to the great regret of many. He was in later years a much valued member of many scientific societies and an habitual frequenter of the Royal Institution, near which he lived. The cause of his death, as I heard of it, was pathetic. He had built and resided at a charming house in Surrey, near Holmbury St. Mary, but retained his house in Clifford Street for some years, where he occasionally made appointments with old patients. At last the time came for wholly abandoning it. He lingered about the cold house, visiting every part of it for the last time, for he had an affectionate nature, caught a severe chill in doing so, and died of pneumonia.
To go back to the year 1838. I greatly enjoyed the tour and the companionship of Bowman, from whom I doubtless imbibed and assimilated more than I can now distinguish. The only event of a medical character that I saw with him was a small operation, the first I ever witnessed. A comic experience next occurred. I accompanied Bowman to a lunatic asylum in Vienna. In those days I was particularly shy and sensitive, and a consciousness of even the least unconventionality made me blush to an absurd degree. In one of the female wards, a young, buxom, and uncommonly good-looking female lunatic dashed forward with a joyful scream, she clasped me tightly to her bosom with both her arms, calling me her long-lost Fritz! Tableau—Amusement of the others, myself pink to the ears.
I may as well here continue to talk about Bowman. He was a most accurate and gifted draughtsman of pathological subjects. One of his earliest discoveries related to the liver, and I was familiar with a drawing in colours that he had made in illustration, which was preserved with great respect at the Birmingham Hospital. In later years he told me that having no further use for his collection of drawings, he gave them to Dr. B. In time Dr. B. died, and Bowman then became desirous to get back his old drawings as mementoes of early work, but could hear nothing of them. By an extraordinary chance he was looking one day at prints in a second-hand and second-rate book-shop, when his eye caught sight of a corner of these very drawings. They were all there, and he bought them all back. He could not learn their intermediate history.
It was in the autumn of 1838 that I took up my abode, as indoor pupil, in the Birmingham General Hospital, then situated near Snow Hill. My immediate chief was the house surgeon, Mr. Baker, who ultimately gained considerable repute as a surgeon in Birmingham, but is now dead. My one fellow indoor pupil had a similarly successful career to that of Mr. Baker. There were also in the common dining-room two officials, the matron and the treasurer. Matters were very different then; I, a mere boy of sixteen, but with unquestionably an eager mind, was thrust without any previous experience into a post that I found in a few months’ time to be one of much responsibility. At first I was set to work every morning to help in the dispensary. It was a room with a dresser and a service door at the side. I there learnt the difference between infusions, decoctions, tinctures, and extracts, and how to make them. Possibly the reader may not know the meanings of these words, so I venture to give them. Tea is an “infusion,” made by pouring boiling water on the tea and allowing it to stand. Coffee is, or would be a “decoction” if made by boiling the mixture. Infusions and decoctions are cheap forms of medicine, suitable for hospitals where they are made daily, but they soon spoil when kept. “Tinctures” are made by pouring spirits of wine instead of water on the drugs; they keep indefinitely, but are more costly, and therefore rarely used in hospitals. “Extracts” are made by boiling down decoctions.
All this is easily done when the proper simple apparatus and means of heating are at hand. I once made an extract as an experiment that I recommend to the notice of students who may wish to taste the ne plus ultra of bitterness. It was from quassia, that curious tree of South America, of which the very chips are bitter. The once well-known “bitter cup” is made of quassia wood. When water is poured into the cup, it quickly becomes bitter. Quassia is a valuable tonic medicine, with perhaps the one fault of cheapness. An apothecary can hardly be expected to feel easy in conscience when he charges apothecary’s prices for what every little chip of a timber tree affords when put into hot water. Anyhow, I made a large jugful of decoction of quassia and boiled it down until a sticky residue was left, which is, or might be, called “quassine.” I put a piece of it about the size of a pin’s head upon my tongue, and then—oh then! Try it, if you doubt its absolute bitterness.
It was amusing at first to make pills. The pill mass had to be brayed together in a mortar, occasionally adding water or I forget what other liquid, to render it of the proper consistency. Next a certain weight of the pill mass was rolled out by the help of a simple but ingeniously arranged slab, into a long worm of equal diameter and of standard length. Then the worm was cut simultaneously into equal segments, by the pressure of the grooved back of the same slab, by means of which the segments were also rolled into pills.
The other day I visited the great store and manufactory of chemical and other apparatus of Messrs. Griffiths, in or near Aldwych Street, and saw there a machine, occupying little more room than a moderately sized washing-stand, that claimed to turn out pills at the rate of one million in each twenty-four hours,—so if forty-five of these machines were kept continually at work day and night, it would enable a grandmotherly Socialist Government to supply to every man, woman, and child of the forty-five millions of inhabitants of the British Isles one free pill daily.
The out-patients clustered in the hall outside the service window of the dispensary, and were supplied in turn. Then the prescriptions of the in-patients were handed in and attended to. It was a busy time. I learnt to do most of my part pretty well in a very few weeks, after which I was promoted to higher things.
Having always the run of the dispensary, and being a boy, I found certain drugs, such as liquorice, much to my taste, but especially poppy seed. A large number of poppy capsules were kept in stock for making soothing lotions. They are full of seeds, which contain no opium at all. These are not used for the lotions, but are particularly pleasant to munch, and I ate them in abundance when the humour seized me. In later years I found poppy seeds in common use somewhere in Germany, for making a particular pudding; I think it was in Bonn.
The duties gradually imposed on me were to go with the surgeons on their morning rounds, always to attend in the accident room, where persons suffering from accidents were received whether in the night or day, and to help in dressing them, also to be present at all operations, and to take part at every post-mortem examination, of which there were perhaps two or three weekly. The times of which I am speaking were long before those of chloroform, and many long years before that of Pasteur and Sir Joseph Lister. The stethoscope was considered generally to be new-fangled; the older and naturally somewhat deaf practitioners pooh-poohed and never used it.
I cannot understand to this day why youths selected for their powers of sharp hearing should not be so far instructed as to be used by physicians, much as pointers and setters are used by sportsmen. They could be taught what to listen for, probably by means of some sound-emitting instruments more or less muffled, and how to describe what they heard. A patient during the incipient stage of his disease might be submitted to examination by one or more of these quick-hearing youths, who would report to the doctor, who thereupon would form and express his opinion. Similarly as regards touch, of which great delicacy is of the highest importance. Conceive what help might be given by them in discovering deeply seated tumours, abscesses, and much else. The touch of a person far less sensitive than that of the wandering Princess of the well-known fairy tale might prove of vital importance. It will be recollected that her Princess-ship was acknowledged by all, through her discovering a pea surreptitiously inserted as a test, below the bottom of the pile of feather-beds on which she slept.
To return to my duties. Accidents occurred, of course, at all hours of the day and night. It was unpleasant to be summoned out of a warm bed to attend upon these once on a cold night, but it was not a hardship; to be summoned twice was trying; but thrice, as sometimes happened, was more than I could have endured had it frequently occurred. Burns were the commonest of the accidents at night-time. The sufferers were piteous to see. As a rule they did not complain much of pain, but they shivered from a sense of cold and were enfeebled almost to prostration by the shock. There was nothing to be done to them beyond cutting away all adherent clothing and the like, packing them in cotton wool and sending them to a ward. One particular ward was allotted to that purpose. The contrast was great between the neatly dressed patient of the first night and the wretched creature two days after, when suppuration had begun and the foul dressings had to be carefully picked off and replaced by clean ones.
Broken heads from brawls were common accidents at night; then it was my part to shave the head, using the blood as lather, which makes a far better preparation for shaving than soap. The wounds were stitched together with a three-cornered “glove needle,” which cuts its way through the skin. Some riots connected with the “Charter” occurred at this time, and many people were hurt. It was curious to observe the apparent cleanness of the cuts that were made through the scalp by the blow of a policeman’s round truncheon.
It sometimes happened that a severe case was brought at night-time, which required higher surgical skill than could properly be expected in the house surgeon, who, though professionally qualified, was young, and therefore relatively unpractised. If the treatment of any such accident admitted of no delay, a messenger was dispatched to the house of the surgeon himself, to wake and bring him. One of these events made a great impression on me. It was that of a man, a small piece of whose skull had been depressed by something falling on his head and stunning him. He was brought in utterly unconscious, with the “stertorous” or snoring respiration characteristic of such cases. The man had to be trepanned, so the surgeon was sent for. In the meantime everything was prepared for his arrival. The trepan is a hollow steel cylinder with teeth cut out of its lower rim, used to saw a circular wad out of the sound bone nearest to the fracture. A miniature steel crowbar is used to raise the depressed fragment, and a rod to lay across the sound bone as a fulcrum for the crowbar. I seem to see it all before me as I write. The brightly lighted room, the apparatus in order, the surgeon at work, the eager faces of the bystanders, and the utterly unconscious patient. The wad was cut out, the crowbar adjusted, and still the monotonous snore continued unchanged. Then pressure was put on the free end of the crowbar, the broken bit of skull was raised, and instantly life rushed back. The man continued a sentence that he must have begun before the accident; then he stared wildly, and said, “Where am I?” The clock of life had stopped through a temporary obstruction, the obstruction was removed and the clock ticked on as before. He was soothed, a silver plate was inserted over the hole, the scalp was replaced and stitched together, and he was sent into the ward. In due time he wholly recovered, the scalp having grown over the plate.
I had the option of accompanying any of the surgeons or physicians on his morning round. Each had his clinical clerk, who made notes of the case and wrote the treatment prescribed from time to time, upon a paper affixed to a board at the bed-head. I appreciated from the very first the high importance of careful study and record of every case. My feeling is now fully developed which was then in embryo, that it is our duty to avail ourselves of the opportunities that arise from the apparently unmoral course of Nature, of rendering similar events less dangerous and painful in the future. Blind Nature seems to vivisect ruthlessly, let us as reasonable creatures elicit all the good we can from her vivisections, for which we ourselves are in no way responsible. I became a clinical clerk in time, but felt acutely my incompetence to act up to my own high ideals.
It was a surprise to me to notice so few signs of pain and distress in the wards, even among the mortally stricken. I met with no instances of terror at approaching death, while the ordinary interests of life seemed powerful up to the close of consciousness. But it must be terrible to a sensitive and stricken fellow-patient with all his senses still on the alert, when the death-hour of some one else in the ward arrives, and the curtains are drawn around the dying man’s bed to hide the scene, and again when his remains are removed to the post-mortem room. All these things are, however, more hideous to the imagination than in reality. One piteous death-bed scene much impressed me. A girl was fast dying of typhus, and I had been instructed to apply a mustard plaister. When I came to her, she was fully sensible, and said in a faint but nicely mannered way, “Please leave me in peace. I know I am dying, and am not suffering.” I had not the heart to distress her further.
The opinions held by the students about the several physicians and surgeons were curiously guided by a mixture of loyalty and irreverence. There was no doubt of the fact that M., one of the doctors, who never professed or had a claim to scientific acquirements, got his patients out of hospital more quickly than any of his colleagues. His treatment was as simple as that of Dr. Sangrado, though of quite another kind. It consisted of a strong purgative followed by low diet, and a subsequent feeding up as soon as all fever had gone. The composition of his drench never varied; a big bottle of it was made every morning in the dispensary, in readiness to be served out. It was so cheap that the overplus could be thrown away and a fresh infusion made the next day.
It is to be wished that some “index of curative skill” could be awarded to doctors, based on their respective hospital successes. I have often amused myself with imaginary schemes to this effect. If it could be compiled truthfully, it would be an excellent guide to those who wanted a doctor but were doubtful whom to consult. A high index of curative skill would serve as a measure of merit, and the fee to the doctor might be regulated by its height.
I threw myself into my duties with zeal, and loved neat bandaging and neat plaistering. Each clinical clerk had a dressing board, supported against his body by a strong band passed over his neck: its ends were fixed to the board. Lint, plaister, scissors, forceps, probe, and a few other simple surgical instruments completed the outfit. There was much bleeding from the arm, especially of out-patients; there were also cuppings and insertion of issues and of setons. All these I could soon do creditably; I was fairly good even at tooth-drawing. I set broken limbs, at first under strict supervision, but was latterly allowed much freedom. I had also occasionally to reduce dislocations of the arm, and once at least of the thigh. The mechanism of the body began to appear very simple in its elementary features. At one time no less than sixteen fractures, dislocations, or other injuries to the arms, or parts of them, were practically under my sole care all at the same time. Of course my proceedings were carefully watched.
The following incident in those pre-chloroform days set me thinking. A powerful drayman was brought in dead drunk, with both of his thighs crushed and mangled by a heavy waggon. They had to be amputated at once. He remained totally unconscious all the time, and it was not until he awoke sober in the morning that he discovered that his legs were gone. He recovered completely. The question that then presented itself to me was, “Why could not people be made dead drunk before operations? Could it not be effected without upsetting their digestion and doing harm in other ways?” The subsequent discovery of inhaling, instead of drinking the intoxicating spirit, whether it be chloroform or ether, solved that question most happily.
The cries of the poor fellows who were operated on were characteristic; in fact, each class of operation seemed to evoke some peculiar form of them. All this was terrible, but only at first. It seemed after a while as though the cries were somehow disconnected with the operation, upon which the whole attention became fixed.
It was obvious that different persons felt pain with very different degrees of acuteness. I may here go quite out of chronological sequence, and refer to an experience in 1851, when I was on the point of starting from a mission station on my exploration of Damara Land, then wholly unknown but now a German possession. It will be again alluded to in a later chapter. A branch missionary outpost, twenty miles off, had lately been raided, and most of the people, other than the missionaries themselves, murdered. Of those who escaped, two women, each with both of their feet hacked off, made their way to the station, at which I saw them. The Damara women wear heavy copper rings on their ankles, put on when they are growing girls that the rings may not slip over their feet when they are adult. These coveted treasures can therefore be obtained only by the summary process of cutting off the feet. In this horribly mutilated state the two women crawled the whole of the twenty miles. The stumps had healed when I saw them. I asked how they staunched the blood. They explained by gesture that it was by stumping the bleeding ends into the sand, and they grinned with satisfaction while they explained.
I may yet travel onwards many more years to another illustrative anecdote. I happened to be President of the Anthropological Institute, when a very interesting memoir was read on the subject now in question. Numerous instances were given of a very startling character, but the one that seemed the most so was a story told there by the late Sir James Paget, as communicated to him by a trustworthy friend; he added that he felt compelled to believe it. It referred to a native New Zealander. It appeared that at the time in question it was the height of fashion for the Maoris to wear boots on great occasions, and not to appear barefooted. A youth had saved money and went to a store a long way off, where he purchased a pair of these precious articles. On returning home he tried to put them on, but one of his feet had a long projecting toe which prevented it from being thrust home. He went quite as a matter of course to fetch a bill-hook which was at hand, and, putting his foot on a log of wood, chopped off the end of his long toe and drew on the boot.