Francis Darwin

About Francis Darwin

Family

“In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it.”
— "Francis Galton", the first Galton Lecture, delivered before the Eugenics Education Society, 16 February 1914; reprinted, with some changes, from the Eugenics Review of April 1914, in Rustic Sounds and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History (London: John Murray, 1917), p. 24
“There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed.”
— Vol. 1, ch. 3 (p. 148)
“The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.”
— Vol. 1, ch. 3 (p. 150)

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.