8vo. half-title, 58 pp. publisher’s advertisements; 2 printed folding tables. Early 20th-century half red morocco gilt, uncut (corners lightly rubbed). 

 

FIRST EDITION, in which Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, used the records of notable families as data to investigate whether scholarly, artistic, and athletic talent were heritable. “He concluded that such talents have a high degree of heritability, and that people vary in the kind and degree of hereditary abilities they possess. He applied the Gaussian or normal curve to the range of human abilities, expanding upon Quetelet’s observation that certain measurable human characteristics are distributed like the error function, and thus gave a new importance to biological and psychological variation, which had previously been regarded as unimportant” (Norman 864). Cushing G82; Garrison-Morton 226; Osler 1599; Waller 15950.