[Rarebooks] The Brilliant Francis Galton

[Garry R Austin]

For your consideration; 

First two volumes of a biography published as three volumes in four.

Pearson, Karl. THE LIFE, LETTERS AND LABOURS OF FRANCIS GALTON; VOLUME I, BIRTH 1822 TO MARRIAGE 1853. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1914. First edition. Quarto, blue cloth, gilt. xxiii, (i), 246pp. Illustrated. Frontispiece portrait and sixty-six black and white plates plus five “Pedgree Plates” in an envelope at rear. Very good. Spines lightly faded.
and;
.............THE LIFE, LETTERS AND LABOURS OF FRANCIS GALTON; VOLUME II, RESEARCHES OF MIDDLE LIFE. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1924. First edition. Quarto, blue cloth, gilt. xii, (i), 425pp. Illustrated. Frontispiece portrait and fifty-four black and white plates. Very good. Spines lightly faded. 

The two volumes postpaid, $150.00

Sir Francis Galton FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meterorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.

Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric  studies.

He was a pioneer in eugenics coining the very term itself and the phrase “nature versus nurture”. " His book, Hereditary Genius (1869), was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness. As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and  differential psychology. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. As the initiator of scientific meteorology he devised the first weather map proposed a theory of anticyclones and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale.He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.


Garry R Austin
mail at austinsbooks.com
Austin's Antiquarian Books
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