1 ‘Report of the Council for the Year 1876–1877, presented to the General Committee at Plymouth on Wednesday, August 15th, 1877’, Report of the Forty-Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Plymouth in August 1877, 1878, p. xlix.

2 Galton, Francis, ‘Considerations Adverse to the Maintenance of Section F (Economic Science and Statistics)’, in ‘Economic science and the British Association’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1877) 40, p. 471.Google Scholar

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5 Amongst the most widely cited and recent of the vast number of studies of the biometrician/Mendelian disputes are Gayon, Jean, Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 197–319Google Scholar; Donald A. MacKenzie, ‘Sociobiologies in competition: the biometrician–Mendelian debate’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 243–288; idem, Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Knowledge, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981, Chapters 5 and 6; William B. Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Galton features in histories of a wide range of fields, from psychology to fingerprinting. For example, see Fancher, Raymond E., Pioneers of Psychology, 3rd edn, London: Norton, 1996, pp. 216–245Google Scholar; and Browne, Douglas Gordon and Hill Brock, Alan Saint, Fingerprints: Fifty Years of Scientific Crime Detection, London: George G. Harrap, 1953Google Scholar.

6 Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, New York: Knopf, 1985, Chapter 1Google Scholar. See also Paul, Diane B., Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1998Google Scholar.

7 For more on eugenics, genetics and evolutionary biology in the early twentieth century see Depew, David J. and Weber, Bruce H., Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996Google Scholar, Part 2; M.J.S. Hodge, ‘Biology and philosophy (including ideology)’, in Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.), The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics: A Centenary Reappraisal, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992, pp. 231–293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Cowan, ‘Nature and nurture’, op. cit. (8); Peart, Sandra J. and Levy, David M., ‘Denying human homogeneity: eugenics and the making of post-classical economics’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought (2003) 25, pp. 261–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul, Diane B. and Day, Benjamin, ‘John Stuart Mill, innate differences, and the regulation of reproduction’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences (2008) 39, pp. 222–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Cairnes, J.E., Essays in Political Economy: Theoretical and Applied, London: Macmillan, 1873, pp. 232–233Google Scholar.

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13 Of course, the coherence of such a narrative – in particular the nature of Smith and Ricardo's contributions to the form and substance of mid-nineteenth-century political economy – has frequently been disputed. However, the point remains that most political economists of the mid-nineteenth century saw themselves as working in the tradition of Smith and Ricardo, even if it is debatable whether either would have approved of the direction in which their work was taken. For a useful recent summary of this history see Margaret Schabas, ‘British economic theory from Locke to Marshall’, in Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 171–182.

14 For useful summaries of classical theory see Hutchison, T.W., On Revolutions and Progress in Economic Knowledge, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978Google Scholar, Chapters 2 and 3; and Schabas, op. cit. (13).

15 Sidgwick, Henry, The Principles of Political Economy, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1887, p. 4Google Scholar. Indeed, as H.S. Foxwell – the economist Alfred Marshall's colleague at Cambridge University – wrote in 1887, classical political economy was ‘secure in public esteem on account of the commercial prosperity which set in with the second half of the [nineteenth] century’ – something that was ‘popularly attributed to the policy inaugurated in 1846’. Foxwell, H.S., ‘The economic movement in England’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1887) 2, p. 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Political Economy Club of London, Minutes of Proceedings, 1821–1882, Roll of Members, and Questions Discussed, vol. 4, London, 1882, p. 5. For more on the role of the Political Economy Club in British economics see Henderson, James P., ‘The oral tradition in British economics: influential economists in the Political Economy Club of London’, History of Political Economy (1983) 15, pp. 149–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930, Oxford: Clarendon, 1991Google Scholar; Goldman, Lawrence, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857–1886, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Searle, G.R., Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 Thorold Rogers, James E., The Economic Interpretation of History. Lectures Delivered in Worcester College Hall, Oxford, 1887–8. London, 1888Google Scholar, p. vii.

20 Sidgwick, op. cit. (15), 4–5; Mill, John Stuart, ‘Thornton on labour and its claims’, Fortnightly Review (1869) NS 5, p. 517Google Scholar.

21 For more on the marginal revolution see the special issue in the 1972 volume of History of Political Economy. See also Maas, Harro, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005Google Scholar.

22 For more on the origins of the BAAS's statistical section, which was founded after a talk from the Belgian astronomer and mathematician Adolphe Quételet, see Goldman, Lawrence, ‘The origins of British “social science”: political economy, natural science and statistics, 1830–1835’, Historical Journal (1983) 26, pp. 587–616CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

23 Morrell, Jack and Thackray, Arnold, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford: Clarendon, 1981, p. 296Google Scholar. Indeed, for a period during the mid-nineteenth century, reports of the BAAS meetings carried only abstracts of presentations to Section F.

24 Quoted in Farr's testimony in ‘Proceedings of the forty-third anniversary meeting’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1877) 40, pp. 342–343Google Scholar. Original report not present in BAAS archives.

25 Galton, op. cit. (2), p. 471.

26 J.K. Ingram, ‘Presidential address’, Report of the Forty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Dublin in August 1878, Section F – Economic Science and Statistics, 1879, pp. 642, 641.

27 Pearson, op. cit. (3), ii, p. 348. Indeed, Pearson argued that if Galton's definition of science were ‘rigidly applied’ then ‘it would exclude large regions of biology, including possibly the doctrine of evolution’.

28 Galton's turn to heredity is noted in his wife Louisa's diary, which is transcribed in Pearson, op. cit. (3), ii, p. 70. Galton, , The Art of Travel: Or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, London, 1855Google Scholar. Galton produced five editions of The Art of Travel during his lifetime, the last of which appeared in 1872 and has since been reprinted frequently.

29 Galton, , Memories of My Life, 3rd edn, London: Methuen, 1909, p. 287CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 Galton, op. cit. (29), p. 289.

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35 Galton, op. cit. (32), p. 165.

36 MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, op. cit. (5), pp. 52–56.

37 Galton, op. cit. (29), p. 288.

38 Galton, , Hereditary Genius, London, 1869, p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Diane B. Paul also notes that Galton's view that heredity underpinned social success and progress was not widely held at this time. See Diane B. Paul, ‘Darwin, social Darwinism and eugenics’, in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 229.

39 For more on the history of ‘economic man’ and its problematic place in economic science see Morgan, Mary, ‘Economic Man as model man: ideal types, idealization and caricatures’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought (2006) 28, pp. 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an extended analysis see Davis, John B., The Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value, London: Routledge, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Galton, op. cit. (38), p. 14. As one of my reviewers pointed out, it is possible that Galton had John Stuart Mill – whom he knew – in mind when he made these criticisms. However, Mill never appears as an explicit target in Galton's writings or correspondence. For an account that uses Mill's views of the origins of human differences as a prism through which to understand an aspect of the debate that Galton was entering see Paul and Day, op. cit. (9). For eugenics and post-classical economics see Peart and Levy, op. cit. (9).

41 Indeed, Galton is seen by a number of scholars as being part of a larger group that helped initiate and shape a debate about human evolution and progress that Darwin later joined with his book of 1871, The Descent of Man. See Paul, op. cit. (38), pp. 215–217; and Richards, Robert J., Darwinism and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987Google Scholar, Chapter 4.

42 Cowan, ‘Nature and nurture’, op. cit. (8), pp. 153–158. Cowan's argument is that Galton can be understood as being part of a trend of scepticism about the certainty of social progress amongst Victorian intellectuals, which has been noted by some historians of ideas. For example, see Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957Google Scholar; Burn, W.L., The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation, London: Allen & Unwin, 1964Google Scholar.

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46 Galton, op. cit. (32), p. 157.

47 Galton, op. cit. (38), p. 37.

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49 Galton, op. cit. (29), p. 304.

50 Quételet's two main works of this period were Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou, Essai de physique sociale of 1835, and Lettres sur les probabilités of 1845. Galton directed his readers to the 1849 English translation of the latter work: Galton, op. cit. (38), p. 26. For the historical background and development of error theory see Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stigler, Stephen M., The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986Google Scholar; Gooday, Graeme, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapter 2. See also Victor Hilts's essay on the comparisons between Quételet and Galton's work, ‘Statistics and social science’, in Ronald N. Giere and Richard S. Westfall (eds.), Foundations of Scientific Method: The Nineteenth Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, pp. 206–233.

51 Galton, op. cit. (38), p. 33.

52 Gökyigit, Emel Aileen, ‘The reception of Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius in the Victorian periodical press’, Journal of the History of Biology (1994) 27, pp. 215–240CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

53 Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, p. 115.

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56 For a long-term view of Darwin's ideas on this subject see M.J.S. Hodge, ‘Darwin as a lifelong generation theorist’, in David Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 207–243.

57 Galton, op. cit. (38), p. 373.

58 Galton, op. cit. (38), pp. 371–373.

59 Darwin, op. cit. (54), vol. 2, p. 374.

60 Galton was aided in the initial stages of the experiments by Dr Murie, prosecutor of the Zoological Gardens in London, and later by the assistant prosecutor, Oscar Fraser.

61 Emma Darwin to Henrietta Darwin, 19 March 1870, in Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, p. 158. There was a brief sign of success when, in May 1870, a white foot appeared amongst the litters of grey rabbits. Galton soon discovered, though, that it was a common occurrence, even amongst pure breeds. See Galton to Darwin, 12 May 1870, and Pearson's commentary in Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, p. 160.

62 Galton, op. cit. (29), p. 297.

63 Galton, , ‘Experiments in pangenesis, by breeding from rabbits of a pure variety, into whose circulation blood taken from other varieties had previously been largely transfused’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1870–1871) 19, p. 404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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65 Galton, , ‘Pangenesis’, Nature (1871) 4, p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the pangenesis dispute see Gillham, op. cit. (3), Chapter 13; Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, Chapter 10B; Cowan, ‘Nature and nurture’, op. cit. (8); Gayon, op. cit. (5), pp. 105–115.

66 See Galton and Darwin's correspondence, in Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, pp. 166–177.

67 Galton, , ‘A theory of heredity’, Contemporary Review (1875) 27, p. 81Google Scholar. See also idem, ‘On blood-relationship’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1871–1872) 20, pp. 394–402.

68 Indeed, while Galton mentioned pangenesis in Natural Inheritance – his landmark publication – he did not mention the stirp. The historiographic trend, begun by Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 2, pp. 170–173, and most recently exemplified by Gillham, op. cit. (3), pp. 181–183, has been to present Galton's ideas in terms of their relationship to later orthodoxy. Galton's ‘anticipation’ of the continuity of the germ plasm, for example, is often justified with reference to a letter of 1889 from August Weismann to Galton in which Weismann apologised for not having known earlier of Galton's work on the theory of heredity. Weismann to Galton, 23 February 1889, in Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 3a, p. 341.

69 Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, London: Macmillan, 1883, p. 17 n. 1. During this period, Galton also endeavoured to bring his statistical innovations to bear on intellectual capacities through a range of innovative methods, including standardized questionnaires and composite photography. However, despite their important place in the history of psychology, Galton's methods and results were frequently problematic in terms of the overall project in which he was engaged. See Fancher, op. cit. (5); Gillham, op. cit. (3), Chapter 16.

70 Galton, , ‘On a proposed statistical scale’, Nature (1874) 9, pp. 342–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Galton, , ‘Statistics by intercomparison, with remarks on the Law of Frequency of Error’, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (1875), series 4, 49, p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The probable error – now known as the standard deviation – describes the spread of data.

72 Galton, , ‘Typical laws of heredity’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution (1877) 8, pp. 290–291, 290Google Scholar.

73 Galton, op. cit. (72), pp. 290, 291. Galton's confidence on this point was motivated by the common belief that sweet peas are not subject to cross-fertilization, which has subsequently been shown to be false.

74 Galton, op. cit. (72), p. 291.

75 Galton, , ‘Family records’, The Times, 9 January 1884, p. 10Google Scholar; Galton, , Record of Family Faculties, London: Macmillan, 1884Google Scholar. For the calculation of the worth of Galton's prizes see O'Donoghue, Jim, Goulding, Louise and Allen, Grahame, ‘Consumer price inflation since 1750’, Economic Trends (2004) 604, pp. 41–43Google Scholar. The prize money came from Galton's private wealth, which he had inherited in 1844 from his father, Samuel Tertius Galton, who was a successful banker.

76 As Raymond Fancher points out, a number of the seventeen measurements, including reaction times and head size, were rooted in Galton's belief that they were indicators of intellectual ability: Fancher, op. cit. (5), pp. 216–217. However, as with his other efforts in this respect (see note 69 above), the Anthropometric Laboratory data did not enable Galton to substantiate such beliefs.

77 Galton, , ‘Prize records of family faculties’, The Times, 9 May 1884, p. 9Google Scholar; ‘Prize family record’, The Times, 27 June 1884, p. 12.

78 Galton, , ‘On the Anthropometric Laboratory at the late International Health Exhibition’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1885) 14, p. 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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80 For example, in the case of height, Galton multiplied female measurements by 1.08 – the factor he had calculated as accounting for the general difference in stature of men and women.

81 Galton, , ‘Presidential address’, Report of the Fifty-Fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Aberdeen in September 1885, Section H – Anthropology, 1886, p. 1208Google Scholar.

82 Galton, op. cit. (81), p. 1207.

83 Galton, op. cit. (81), p. 1209.

84 Galton, op. cit. (81), p. 1210. Galton's development of regression was highly problematic. See Stigler, op. cit. (50), pp. 294–297. See also Magnello, M. Eileen, ‘Karl Pearson's mathematization of inheritance: from ancestral heredity to Mendelian genetics (1895–1909)’, Annals of Science (1998) 55, pp. 35–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Galton, , ‘Family likeness in eye-colour’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1886) 40, pp. 402–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Regression towards mediocrity in heredity stature’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1886) 15, pp. 246–263CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘President's address’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1886) 15, pp. 488–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Galton, , Natural Inheritance, London, 1889, p. 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For further elaboration on and illustrations of this point see Gayon, op. cit. (5), pp. 170–172; Gould, Stephen Jay, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 342–351Google Scholar.

87 Galton, op. cit. (69), p. 334.

88 For background and further detail on the biometrician–Mendelian dispute see sources cited in note 5.

89 Pearson, op. cit. (3), vol. 3a, pp. 87–88.

90 Indeed, having helped found the Committee for Conducting Statistical Inquiries into Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals at the Royal Society of London in 1894 with Weldon, Galton then opened the committee up to Bateson and other non-biometricians in 1897 when he renamed it the Evolution (Plants and Animals) Committee. However, the result was the intellectual alienation of the two groups, which was symbolized by Weldon and Pearson's departure from the Royal Society committee to found the journal Biometrika in 1901, and a high level of personal animosity that was only brought to an end by Weldon's untimely death in 1906.

91 For more on the concerns about the fitness of Boer War recruits and related concerns about degeneration see Soloway, Richard A., Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990Google Scholar, Chapter 3; Paul, op. cit. (6), Chapter 1; Mazumdar, Pauline M.H., Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain, London: Routledge, 1992, Chapter 1Google Scholar; Kevles, op. cit. (6), Chapter 5.

92 Chris Renwick, ‘The British debate about the identity of sociology, 1876–1908’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2009; Otter, Sandra den, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Lawrence, ‘Foundations of British sociology 1880–1930: contexts and biographies’, Sociological Review (2007) 55, pp. 431–440CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halliday, R.J., ‘The sociological movement, the Sociological Society and the genesis of academic sociology in Britain’, Sociological Review (1968) 16, pp. 377–398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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95 Victor Branford to Lady Victoria Welby, 12 April 1904, Welby Collection, Clara Thomas Special Collections and Archives, York Univeristy, Toronto, MS 1970-010/002, folder 2.

96 For more on the audience participants see ‘Discussion – eugenics: its definition, scope and aims’, Sociological Papers (1904) 1, pp. 53–63Google Scholar.

97 Galton, , ‘Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims’, Sociological Papers (1904) 1, pp. 43–50Google Scholar. This paper was subsequently published in Nature (1904) 70, p. 82 – and was included in Galton's compilation of essays: Galton, , Essays in Eugenics, London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909, Chapter 2Google Scholar.

98 Galton, op. cit. (97), p. 45.

99 Galton, op. cit. (97), p. 46.

100 Galton, op. cit. (97), p. 50.

101 Galton, op. cit. (97), p. 48.

102 Galton, op. cit. (97), p. 49.

103 See ‘Discussion – eugenics’, op. cit. (96).

104 Radick, Gregory, ‘Introduction: why what if?’, Isis (2008) 99, pp. 547–551CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Henry, ‘Ideology, inevitability, and the Scientific Revolution’, ibid., pp. 552–559; Peter Bowler, ‘What Darwin disturbed: the biology that might have been’, ibid., pp. 560–567; Steven French, ‘Genuine possibilities in the scientific past and how to spot them’, ibid., pp. 568–575 ; Steve Fuller, ‘The normative turn: counterfactuals and a philosophical historiography’, ibid., pp. 576–584. For more on the history of counterfactual reasoning and explanation by historians see Niall Ferguson, ‘Introduction. Virtual History: towards a “chaotic” theory of the past’, in idem (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, London: Picador, 1998, pp. 1–90.

105 Famously, of course, Robert W. Fogel was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1993 – jointly with Douglass North – for a counterfactual investigation of the role of railroads in economic growth.

106 Shapin, Steven, review of Noretta Koertge, New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, BJHS (2009) 42, pp. 116–117Google Scholar.