[GALTON, FRANCIS]. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan and Co., 1892.
SECOND UK EDITION. Leather-bound; hardcover; crown octavo (21 x 13.5 x 3.5 cm); pp. xxxii, [5], 379, [1], [4, advertisements]. English text. Handsomely bound in half calf gilt; marbled paper-covered boards; unevenly cut fore edge; half-title; diagrams and tables in the text; printed footnotes; rear index in double columns. Printed by Richard Clay. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure. Covers very well-preserved. Slight marginal staining to a few initial leaves, otherwise contents remaining clean. Previous owner signature to title-page.
Notes: "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 of 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)". This is a nicely rebound copy of the second UK edition.
