This brought a quick rejoinder from Darwin, who believed his cousin had mistakenly assumed hereditary material to be transmitted through the blood. In the following year, Galton delivered a paper to the Royal Society claiming that his results tended to disprove Darwin’s theory (Galton 1871). He reported regularly to Darwin on these experiments, which involved transfusing blood between differently coloured varieties, usually to little or no effect: “Two more litters & no happy results”, he wrote on 26 April 1870.
#Galton and darwin series
Shortly after Darwin published his preliminary hypothesis of pangenesis in Variation (1868), Galton began a series of experiments on rabbits to test the theory. This was later expanded into the book, Hereditary Genius (1869), which contained an entry on the Darwin family, including the “author of the Theory of Natural Selection”, two of Darwin’s sons (George and Leonard) who had distinguished themselves in exams, and (alluding perhaps to himself) “others of the family who, in a lesser but yet decided degree, have shown a taste for subjects of natural history”. He soon became interested in patterns and mechanisms of inheritance, writing a preliminary paper on hereditary talent in 1865. On receiving a copy of Origin, Galton remarked that reading the book was like being ‘initiated into an entirely new province of knowledge’ ( 9 December 1859). Darwin enjoyed and admired Galton’s book, and reintroduced himself to his cousin, later seeking information on domestic animals in Africa. On inheriting a large fortune from his father, he abandoned medicine, which he disliked, indulged in travel and sport, and then financed his own expedition to southwest Africa (1850-52), completing a natural historical narrative of the journey (Galton 1853).
Born in Birmingham in 1822, Galton studied medicine at King’s College, London, and also read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a second cousin of Darwin’s, having descended from his grandfather, Erasmus. Galton was a naturalist, statistician, and evolutionary theorist.
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