RUSTIC SOUNDS

Sounds are to me more reminiscent than sights; they bring back the sensations of childhood, and indeed all memories of my past life, in a way more touching and clear than what is seen.  Wendell Holmes claims the sense of smell as most closely associated with memory; for me, as I say, it is that of hearing.

In this paper I shall wander in imagination through the different seasons in the home of my youth, and let the recalled rustic sounds lead where they will.

To children there is something impressive and almost sacred in the changes of the seasons, in the onset of winter, or the clear approach of spring.  The first of these changes was heralded for me by the appearance of puddles frozen to a shining white; mysterious because the frost had drunk them dry in roofing them with ice, and especially delightful in the sharp crackling sound they gave when trodden on.  This was the noise of the beginning of winter.  Another winter memory is the humming whistle of the boys’ feet as they slid on the village pond, a remembrance that recalls my envious admiration of their heavily nailed boots, giving them an advantage in pace and a more noble style of sliding.

Another winter note was the hooting of invisible owls, boldly calling to each other from one moonlit tree to another.  In the spring there was the querulous sound of the lambs, staggering half fledged in the cold fields among the half-eaten turnips beside their dirty yellow mothers.  Not the sheep of the Dresden shepherdess, but rather of the old man in As You Like It, who warns Rosalind that shepherding has its ugly side.  Yet it had something prophetic of more genial days.

I cannot leave the Canadian poet without a reference to the beautiful line, (“A robin piping in the dark alone.”)  A Canadian robin must surely make a song like ours, who seems also to sing in parenthesis.

The other form of rustic pipe that pleased me was a sort of oboe made from a dandelion stalk by squeezing it at one end.  It had a rough nasal note, which could be controlled by holes cut in the stalk and stopped with the fingers.  This again was but brief satisfaction, for the two halves of the reed soon curled outwards and ceased to speak.  In later life this curling outwards was made use of in my work in the physiology of plants.  I like to remember that my primeval oboe gave me the idea.

From this digression, originating in the whistle cut from a horse-chestnut bough, I return to some less artificial sounds.  I must say a word about the song of birds, but my knowledge of the subject is but small.  The most obvious of spring-time sounds is the voice of the cuckoo.  I confess to liking the muttering chuckle which, in an unscientific mood, I have supposed to mean that an egg has successfully been laid in a hedge-sparrow’s nest.  But the cuckoo’s “word in a minor third” is always delightful.  The bird is neither more nor less of a foreigner than a willow-wren, yet he has, in comparison to the wren’s subdued chromatic warble, a song so self-assertive, and a tone so unlike our other birds, that one feels him an obvious exotic, a foreigner of so glorious and dashing a nature that one is grateful to him for singing among flat ploughed lands and monotonous hedges.  I fancy the Welsh proverb, “Who would have thought the cuckoo would sing on the turf-heaps of the mountains,” is a poetic reflexion of this thought.

Another bird that moves one in a very different way is the robin, of whom it is hard to say whether he has more of tears or smiles in his recitative.  In comparison to the night-jar he seems like a civilised human soul who has quite modern sorrows, and has half forgotten them in quiet contentment with the autumn sunshine.  The blackbird has a tinge of the robin’s sentiment, but it is over-borne by the glory of his song as a whole, which is pure gold, like his beak.

The chaffinch is not an interesting person, and he is so numerous that one soon becomes weary of him and his song.  Let us hope that he expresses his real nature in the building of his pretty nest rather than in song.  This must, I think, often happen, and to take an example from human builders, it is not inconceivable that the architect of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge, may have sung delightfully.  But there are limits to one’s faith, and personally I cannot imagine the desecrator of Pembroke College in the same injured town of Cambridge practising any art in a way that would please me.

“Sitzend im Grünen
Mit Halmen umhüllt,”

and singing “Lobe Gott” all day in the rhythm with which the oboe praises God in the Pastoral Symphony.

I come now to human sounds.  It was exciting to wake at 5 o’clock some morning in June, and to learn by the sound of scythes being whetted that the mowers had arrived, and that the hay harvest had actually begun.  The field had been a great sea of tall grasses, pink with sorrel and white with dog-daisies, a sacred sea into which we might not enter.  But now we could at least follow the mowers, and watch the growth of the tracks made by their shifting feet, and listen to the swish of the scythes as the swathes of fallen grass and flowers also grew in length.  There was something military in their rhythm, and something relentless and machine-like in their persistence.  But our admiration was mixed with pity from the time that one of them told us that after the first day’s mowing he was too tired to sleep.  In later years another sound was associated with haymaking, when in an Alpine meadow the group of resting peasants were heard hammering the blades of their little pre-Raphaelite scythes to flatten the dents made by stones hidden among the grass.

Another sound I like to recall is connected with the memory of my father.  He daily took a certain number of turns round a little wood planted by himself, and christened the Sandwalk.  As he paced round it he struck his heavy iron-shod walking-stick against the ground, and its rhythmical click became a familiar sound that spoke of his presence near us, and was associated with his constant sympathy in our pursuits.  It is a sound that seems to me to have lasted all those years that stretch from misty childish days until his death.  I am sure that all his children loved that sound.

February, 1912.

I should like to express my appreciation of the honour done me in asking me to give the first Galton lecture.  In many ways I am a bad choice, since I have had no share in his science of eugenics, neither has my research-work been directly connected with evolution.  I can only hope that in consideration of my delight in the fibre and flavour of Galton’s mind, with its youth, its charm of humour, and its ever-springing originality and acuteness,—I say that I hope these considerations may excuse me for having undertaken an office for which I am in so many ways unfitted.

One of his most obvious characteristics was his love of method.  I do not mean methodicalness, but that he took delight in knowing how to do all manner of things in the very best way.  He also liked to teach his methods to others.  Those who never saw him, or even read his books, will exclaim, “What a bore he must have been.”  One might as well call the lightning a bore for explaining that the thunder was coming, or complain of the match for boring the gunpowder as to the proper way of exploding.  With Galton’s explanations there was a flash of clear words, a delightful smile or gesture, which seemed to say: “That’s all—don’t let me take up your time.”  Nobody was ever more decidedly the very antithesis of a bore than Francis Galton.

He liked, of course, to be useful to weary and thirsty travellers, but he was as much, or more, impelled by the love of method for its own sake.  He was in fact an artist in method.  The same thing is shown in a letter he wrote to Nature near the end of his life, explaining how to cut a cake on scientific principles so that it shall not become stale.  This again was not so much a philanthropic desire that his fellow men should not have dry cake, as delight in method.

When I re-read The Art of Travel quite recently, I could not find his method of preventing a donkey braying.  My recollection is that, observing a braying donkey with tail erect, he argued that if the tail were forcibly kept down, as by tying a stone to it, the braying would not occur.  I certainly believe myself to have read or heard that this most Galtonian plan succeeded.

He received no answer from the War Office, but a personal application to Lord Palmerston led to his being installed.  He speaks of a few officers attending his course, and adds that the “rude teachings of the Crimean War soon superseded” his own.

In relation to what I have been speaking of, I must here be allowed to turn back to an earlier period of his life.  In illustrating the different dispositions of his sisters, both of whom were dear to him, Galton writes:

“My eldest sister was just, my youngest 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.”

Have we not here an early appreciation of method, or must we merely class the memory with the scene in “Great Expectations,” where the terrifying elder sister, Mrs. Joe, prepares bread and butter for her husband and for Pip (her little brother) in an eminently just and disagreeable manner.  May I be allowed to add that a love of butter in the big holes is not hereditary in all branches of the family; I should have loved the sister who picked it out.

In 1838, when Galton was sixteen years of age, he became an indoor pupil at the Birmingham General Hospital.  Here the education was at any rate practical enough, and to this coddled generation it sounds a rough introduction to medicine.  He had to prepare tinctures, extracts, decoctions, and learned to make pills by hand—a slow enough process.  In later life, when he saw a pill-making machine at work, it must have been his boyish memories which inspired the characteristic calculation that if a grandmotherly Government possessed forty-five of these engines, it could supply each inhabitant of the British Isles with one pill per diem.

Another characteristic event was his attempt to learn the properties of all the drugs in the pharmacopœia by personal experience.  He determined to dose himself alphabetically, but got no further than C., for the effects of croton oil put a stop to his thirst for first-hand knowledge.

We must pass over his time at King’s College, London, where, as he sat at lecture, he could see the “sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on the Thames,” a vision which stirred his blood with a longing for adventure, and which, as he characteristically noticed, always occurred when the weather-cock on the Horse Guards showed that the south-west wind was blowing.

Meanwhile I wish to say something of his love of experiment, which is a branch of his devotion to method.  We know something of the more entertaining of his inquiries from his delightful book of Memories, yet I cannot but fear that he has left out many experiments even stranger than those he publishes.  My father had a special affection for what in his own case he called “Fool’s experiments.”  These are what, I am afraid, Galton may have omitted.  Still there are records of some delightful lines of work.  He is probably the only man who ever attempted to solve by experiment the problem of free will and determinism.  He limited his inquiry to the question—whether there exists in human affairs such a thing as an “uncaused and creative action.”  The experiment, or rather self-observation, was carried on (1879) for six weeks, almost continuously, and “off and on for many subsequent months.”  He found that with practice he could nearly always trace the “straightforward causation” of a given action, which at first seemed to have been performed “through a creative act, or by inspiration.”

These experiments seem to me very characteristic of the man in their originality, their humour, and their unexpected measure of success, for personally, I should have prophesied failure in all.  They have a special bearing on Galton’s belief that a quasi-religious enthusiasm for eugenics may be built up.  I have sometimes wondered that he should believe this great change so feasible, but I understand how he came to think so when I read of his strange power of impressing beliefs on himself, with such force as to leave a trail of discomfort in the mind after the make-believe had ceased.

These and similar trials were, I think, made in relation to his desire to weigh and measure human faculty in a broad sense.  I remember his telling me of his experiments on the mind of the British cabman.  His method was to use alternately two different forms of the address to which he wished to go.  Thus on Monday he would tell the man to drive him home to 42, Rutland Gate, on Tuesday he would say, “Rutland Gate, 42,” and so on.  My recollection is that the cabmen understood more quickly the familiar formula in which the number precedes the name of the street.

The chief point in which he came to differ from the Macmillan articles was that he was then “too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation, and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social and religious sentiment.”  I imagine that the pendulum has now swung the other way, and that one of the most hopeful and practical schemes is the prevention of marriage among habitual criminals and the feeble-minded.

Galton attributes his work in heredity in some measure to the publication of the Origin of Species, which, he says, “made a marked epoch” in his “mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally.”

When that book was published in 1859, nearly everyone here to-night must have been too young to know anything of the great change in the colour of human thought which was ushered in.  There are more who may remember how twelve years later, when the Descent of Man came out, there was still plenty of clerical and other forms of foolish bitterness.  But a man needs to have been in the full swing of mental activity in 1859 to perceive the greatness of the change due to the Origin of Species.

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.”

But it obviously does not follow that the laborious and skilful work of Galton and his school is wasted.  Those who wish to have made plain to them how Biometrics may illuminate a problem which cannot as yet be solved in Mendelian fashion, should read Dr. Schuster’s most interesting book on eugenics.  I am thinking especially of the question as to the heredity of tuberculosis and cancer.  The relation between Galtonism and Mendelism is also well and temperately discussed in the late Mr. Lock’s Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, 1906.

But it is time to speak of Galton as a eugenist—on which if we look to the distant future his fame will rest.  For no one can doubt that the science of eugenics must become a great and beneficent force in the evolution of man.

Here we see the future of eugenics marked out for us, and the last sentence might well serve as a motto for this Society.  How are we to work for the cause?

It is true that our opinions are formed by the daily papers, and our actions as a nation are determined by political parties which come and go largely by chance.  But however our opinions originate, if they are strongly and persistently urged by a large majority of Englishmen, great changes in the manner of human life may be effected.  Persistence is the great thing in all reforms: in the words of my father’s favourite quotation—“It’s dogged as does it.”  Francis Galton has been temperately persistent in a marked degree.  His caution and wisdom are illustrated by the dates of his writings on eugenics and heredity, which placed in order suggest a regiment relentlessly advancing, not a bunch of heroes rushing on a breach:—

His temperate advance is all the more striking when we remember the fiery impatience with which in Hereditary Genius he spoke of the harm done by the Church in ordaining that the intellectuals, the literary, and the sensitive should be celibates, and of the wholesale slaughter by the Holy Inquisition of the courageous and clear minded who dared to think for themselves.

In a scarlet runner the shoot is not completely vertical, but bends over to one side.  To record the movements of the plant a series of photographs may be taken vertically from above the plant, so that the end of the shoot shows like the hand of a watch against a sort of clock-face on which the points of the compass are marked.  Such photographs show how the shoot swings round in its instinctive search for another stick to climb.

This well-known movement is performed by a co-ordinated series of curvatures, the exact nature of which need not trouble us now.  Let us rather consider the less obvious power of co-ordination which enables a plant to grow upwards in a straight line.  Think of a forest of pine trees, hundreds of thousands of them, all growing vertically up towards the sky.  Here is a clear case of movement, for the leading shoots were once but a few inches from the ground, and now they are crawling along vertical lines 100 feet up in the air.  It may be said that this is mere increase in size, not movement in the ordinary sense.  But it may be made plain that the trees could not grow in this way had they not a power of curvature, to which the term movement cannot be refused.

It is a remarkable fact that the plant should be stimulated, or stirred up, to a definite curvature by merely placing it horizontally.  The curvature tends to bring the plant into the upright position, and when the whole stem has reached the vertical, the stimulus ceases to exist.  It is as though the plant were in a condition of content when vertical, and of discontent in any other position, and as though the discontent expressed itself in curvature.

It is this power of correcting the line of growth whenever it deviates from the upright that enables the pine tree to grow straight upwards.  And this is what I meant when I said that its habit of growth depends on regulated curvature, to which no one can refuse the name of movement.