Meticulous academic biographies of illustrious personages can be tedious to read, intertwining so many details into the larger narrative that the reader can easily lose track of the storyline. I am happy to report that this is not one of them. At 357 pages, it is just long enough to intimately know Galton as a person and scientist, but without saturating the senses. Sir Francis Galton is perhaps best known today as the founder of eugenics, but he was significant in other areas, such as geography, criminology and statistics, all of which is elegantly laid out here. Importantly, the author treats Galton fairly, and even in the light of eugenics, with all the evil that came of it in the first half of the 20th century, he acknowledges that Galton was a product of Victorian England in the 19th century, simply advancing one logical outcome of his cousin Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, as applied to the human species. There are three chapters (19-21; “Galton’s Disciples”, “Evolution by Jumps” and “The Mendelians Trump the Biometricians”) that I feel are distracting, as they elaborate on either Galton’s protégés or some of his scientific ideas, rather than the man, but overall I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in “meeting” Galton, who for better or worse, was a significant figure at the turn of the 20th century.
Rafael Romero, PhD