Mathematical Treasure: Francis Galton’s Typical Laws of Heredity

Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a Victorian polymath who is now mostly remembered for his work on heredity and eugenics. In his studies, he used and refined the statistics of his time. On 19 February 1877, Galton gave a lecture on heredity to the Royal Institution in London that was later serialized in the British scientific journal Nature. Galton used several diagrams to illustrate statistical principles for measuring heredity across generations. He also employed a mechanism to demonstrate the law of deviation; the images shown here provide two ways of conceptualizing “Galton’s box.”

Digitizations of the three parts of the article are available in the Internet Archive:

• “Typical Laws of Heredity,” Nature 15 (5 April 1877): 492–495.
• “Typical Laws of Heredity II,” Nature 15 (12 April 1877): 512–514.
• “Typical Laws of Heredity III,” Nature 15 (19 April 1877): 532–533.

For a classroom activity utilizing Galton’s mathematics of inheritance, see “Regression to the Mean: A Mini-Primary Source Project for Statistics Students,” by Dominic Klyve.

Index to Mathematical Treasures