ABSTRACT
Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) was at the heart of the intense information collection and exchange carried out by scientists in mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain. Galton was a polymath scientist, best known for founding and defining eugenics, an idea based on some scientific principles that attempted to improve the health of human populations through selective breeding. This chapter shows how Galton was integral in the move from club-land to academy as the collection of information and analysis of it was professionalized from discussion amongst expert enthusiasts in scientific societies to study in universities. Das and Challis argue that in order to understand Galton and the importance of information to his ideas about inheritance and eugenics, he must be placed in both the wider context of the drive to collect information in Britain and the peculiar emphasis placed on biography for understanding history, especially British history. This emphasis was made during a period of substantial colonial expansion and a sense of increasing imperial superiority (and anxiety) about British values and biology. Reference is also made to scientific instruments that Galton used to collect information, now in the museum collections of University College London.
