A cousin of Charles Darwin, he was interested in how Darwin's principles of selection could be applied to humans, and coined the word eugenics for the idea. For the better end of breeding, he looked no further than his own family: here's how he mapped out the brilliance of his nearest and dearest:
The first "brilliant" on row 3 is Charles Darwin: the second is Galton himself.
Galton took his principles of eugenics on tour, creating the Beauty Map of Britain. This involved his loitering in various cities, recording his ratings of the women who passed by. To spare embarrasment, he did this by pricking holes in a piece of paper in his pocket: at the top for "worst", in the middle for "so-so", and at the bottom for "best" London ranked highest; Aberdeen lowest.
The lengths to which Galton would go to save the blushes of the women he wished to calibrate in the cause of science are also shown in this excerpt from his The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853):
The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.
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