Francis galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a Victorian gentleman-scholar of eccentric genius. He devoted his life to measuring everything imaginable-from the frequency of fidgets in a bored audience to the size of the buttocks of a Hottentot woman (from a discreet distance, using a sextant). But what obsessed him above all was mental distinction. Why were some people cleverer than others? Why did intellectual distinction run in some families? And how were intellectual abilities distributed in the population?
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