“I have only read about 50 pages of your book . . . but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong in my inside, I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.” {26b} In reading this great book it is, I think, impossible to doubt the strength of the work. The quiet relentless way in which his territory is pegged out, and the clear wisdom with which the terms of the new science are defined, are equally impressive. And for lighter enjoyment his illustrations are to be recommended. He has to settle precisely what he means by a man being _eminent_ or _illustrious_ before he can begin to ask—are these qualities hereditary? An eminent man is one in four thousand, and to make clear what this implies, he writes: “On the most brilliant of starlight nights there are never so many as 4000 stars visible to the naked eye at the same time; yet we feel it to be an extraordinary distinction to a star to be accounted as the brightest in the sky.” {27a} If we could imagine that each new night shows us a fresh set of stars, we might speculate as to how many nights we should watch the sky before we found one bright enough for a Galton. In the same way he tries to make us see a million, because in that number there is but one illustrious man. He worked it out in Bushey Park, where he had gone to see the horse-chestnuts in flower, and came to the astonishing conclusion that, taking one half only of the avenue and the flowers visible on the sunny side of that row, it would require 10 miles of avenue to give 1,000,000 spikes of blossom. Later he defines _mediocrity_ in a way not very flattering to those, who, like myself, live in the country. Mediocrity {27b} then “defines the intellectual power found in most provincial gatherings, because the attractions of a more stirring life in the metropolis and elsewhere are apt to draw away the abler classes of men, and the silly and imbecile do not take a part in the gatherings.” On this last point, by the way, I am not convinced. The research on the heredity of mental and moral characters leads naturally to eugenics, as in the ‘Macmillan’ paper of 1865. But before dealing with this I must say a few words about what, in the opinion of some, is Galton’s chief claim to eminence—the study of heredity as a whole. There is no doubt that he was the first to treat thoroughly and in a strict statistical method, the steps by which one generation passes into the next. He was pre-eminently a lover of statistics, he was indeed what Goschen called himself, “a passionate statistician.” He used Gauss’s Law of Error, which Quetelet had already applied to human measurements. “The primary objects,” he says, “of the Gaussian Law of Error were exactly opposed, in one sense to those to which I applied them. They were to get rid of, or to provide, a just allowance for errors. But these errors or deviations were the very things I wanted to preserve and to know about.”