In 1873 the Victorian scientific polymath Francis Gallon sent out a printed questionnaire to the most distinguished fellows of the Royal Society in London. His aim was to work out the ingredients of heredity, education, outlook and aptitude that went into making a good scientist. The results were published in his 1874 book English Men of Science. To nobody's great surprise, this dogmatic hereditarian concluded that most scientists were born rather than made. Although he did assert that a religious education is harmful to the development of a free, enquiring spirit, he focused almost exclusively on the personal traits of the sci-entists, not on the social structures and contexts that impeded or aided their research. And yet, as Jack Meadows explains in The Victorian Scientist, Galton was living through, and even helping to bring about, a revolution in the way science was done.
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