Prologue

Abstract

In one of the many letters to his niece Milly, Francis Galton — the English scientist who pioneered modern research on heredity and eugenics — muses about a green woodpecker visiting the garden and the “uncommonly attractive“ neighbours’ daughter before making an important, if brief, remark about a request he had received a day before, on 1 December 1907.1 It was made by “a man with a much more horrid name, which I can’t venture to reproduce from memory”, Galton remarked unsympathetically. The correspondent was modestly requesting Galton’s “permission to translate my recent ‘Herbert Spencer Lecture’ into Hungarian, for his Sociological Review, of which he enclosed a prospectus”.²