led him through Syria, and back to England where hunting and shooting, extensive reading and digesting what he read by much thinking about it, completed what we have for convenience differentiated off as the period of training.
The only published paper of this period was a pamphlet, entitled "Telotype, a Printing Electric Telegraph." The following sixty odd years of his life were to be devoted to productive work in the most varied branches of science.
Exploration and Geographical Science
In an atlas of to-day the white areas on the map are very small in comparison with those which are meshed with the highways. The editions in 1849 were very different. "It was a time when the ideas of persons interested in geography were in a justifiable state of ferment."
The journey up the Nile and into the Soudan had been "a tour hastily performed, but sufficient to imbue or poison me with the fascination for further enterprise, which African tourists have so especially felt—a fascination which has often enough proved its power by urging the same traveler to risk his comfort, his health and his life, over and over again, and to cling with pertinacity to a country which after all seems to afford little else but hazard and hardships, ivory and fever."
It was not merely the enticement of big game, of which wonderful stories had begun to come back to England, that attracted Mr. Galton to South Africa. Every chapter of his book, "The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa," bespeaks keenness of observation and solicitude for scientific precision. It can not be abstracted here, neither can space be spared for quotations to show its literary charm. The difficulties of the journey are summarized—and very modestly—in the last chapter.
