QI The Book of the Dead

medical school. Always suspicious of received wisdom, he decided to try all the drugs on himself, working his way through them alphabetically. He got as far as croton oil, a powerful purgative. Thinking that two drops wouldn’t have much effect, he took some, but it produced such alarmingly unpleasant results that he abandoned both the experiment and medicine altogether. He switched to mathematics, enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1840.
    Galton loved the social life at Cambridge and, much like his cousin Charles, made no great impression there academically. At the end of his fourth year, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He later claimed he had a ‘sprained brain’ from working too hard, but he left with a ‘pass’, the lowest level of degree awarded. Shortly after this, he was dealt a further blow by the death of his father. But, like Humboldt and Mary Kingsley, once the initial grief passed, he realised he was free. What’s more, he discovered he was extremely rich. And, like Humboldt and Mary Kingsley, he decided to travel.
    He made his first foray to Egypt and the Sudan, crossing the Nubian Desert by camel and learning Arabic. While sailing down the Nile at night, a shore party set off to shoot a hippo but, mistaking their target in the dark, bagged a cow that had come down to the water’s edge to drink. They had to leave in a hurry. Nor did Dalton make it to his intended destination – the HolyLand. In Damascus his faithful servant Ali died of violent dysentery. Again, Dalton had to make tracks, pursued by a horde of Ali’s ‘grieving relatives’ with threats of legal action (or worse). He arrived back in London with two monkeys, a bad case of gonorrhoea contracted from a prostitute and a strong desire to improve his marksmanship. The monkeys perished when a friend’s landlady left them in a cold scullery overnight but the venereal disease was treated successfully, and Galton spent a good deal of the next three years teaching himself to shoot on various Scottish estates. By 1850 he was ready to risk the tropics again. He bought a papier mâché crown in Drury Lane, announced his intention to place it on the head of ‘the greatest or most distant potentate I should meet with’ and set off to unmapped South West Africa. His thousand-mile accident-prone journey produced two very successful books. The first, Tropical South Africa (1852), won him the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold medal and a Fellowship of the Royal Society. The second, The Art of Travel (1855), a practical handbook, quickly became an essential part of any gentleman’s travelling kit, stuffed with useful tips on making your own pemmican, catching fish without a line, and managing ‘savages’. He advised: ‘A frank, joking but determined manner, joined with an air of showing more confidence in the good faith of the natives than you really feel is the best.’
    In South West Africa, Galton developed the fixation for statistics that would become his lifelong trademark. Adopting the motto ‘Whenever you can, count’, he fastidiously measured everything he came across: horses, cats, plants, human head shapes, portraits, reaction times. He surveyed the heights of mountains by climbing them and boiling kettles at regular intervals to ascertain their altitude, and he devised a method formeasuring the size of African women’s breasts and buttocks by using a sextant. When he finally reached his goal, placing his paper crown on the head of the immensely fat King Nangoro, chief of the Ovambo in northern Namibia, he passed up the chance to verify his instrumental readings at first hand. The chief offered him, by way of thanks, ‘temporary marriage’ to his daughter. When the girl arrived in his tent, naked, smeared with red ochre and butter, Galton ejected her ‘with scant ceremony’. He had no intention of letting her spoil his white linen suit.
    His compulsion for measurement continued on his return to England. He kept a home-made pin-and-paper device in his pocket allowing him to record data unobtrusively. A trip around the country notating the frequency of attractive women led to his publication of a ‘beauty map’ of Britain, stating that London, proportionally speaking, had the most beauties and Aberdeen the highest concentration of the ‘repellent’. At one rather dreary meeting at the Royal Geographical Society he created a ‘boredom’ chart, logging the total number of fidgets per minute. He mapped optimists