4to, orig gilt-pictorial green cloth, gilt-lettered spines; moderately scuffed, light edge wear, spines faded to brown. 4 frontis portraits, 179 plates, 7 fold charts & c in over pockets, facs. 8pp pub cat at back of last vol.

Sound & internally clean. Sir Francis Galton F. R. S. (1822–1911) , half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909. Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime. He created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the very term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. 

As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability. 8 x 11.75" 

"It may be said that a shorter and less elaborate work would have supplied all that was needful.  I do not think so ... I have written my account because I loved my friend and had sufficient knowledge to understand his aims and the meaning of his life for the science of the future. I have had to give up much of my time in the last twenty years to labour which lay outside my proper field, and that very fact induced me from the start to say, that if I spent my heritage in writing a biography it shall be done to satisfy myself and without regard to traditional standards, to the needs of publishers or to the tastes of the reading public."     — Karl Pearson