Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1870
Original mauve cloth with gilt spineSpine faded and lightly spotted, some light brown spotting at fore-edge and fore-margin. Contemporary ownerÕs bookplate from Niagara Co., New York. , [viii], 390, [2, ads] pp. Two folding tables.
Spine faded and lightly spotted, some light brown spotting at fore-edge and fore-margin. Contemporary ownerÕs bookplate from Niagara Co., New York. A good, tight copy., In Hereditary Genius, his best-known and most influential book, Galton investigated the heritability of scholarly, artistic, and athletic talent, using the records of notable families as data. 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 (Haskell Norman Catalogue No. 864). [Galton] in my opinion to-day, created it; there is nothing in the memoirs of Gauss and Bravais that really antedates his discoveries Galton, starting from the organic relationship between parent and offspring, passed to the idea of a coefficient measuring the correlation of all the pairs of organs, and thence to the `organic' relationship of all sorts of factors Galton realized as fully as any of us now the width of application that would open up to the new calculus of correlation His advances were chiefly hampered by the restriction of his data and the need for organized observers and computers (Karl Pearson in Pearson & Kendall, Studies in the History of Statistics and Probability, Volume I, pp. 200-1)., Garrison and Morton 226 (English edition).
$US750
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