Galton's best known work, however, was inspired by his cousin. He also took on important administrative responsibilities: from 1868 to 1900 he served on the council of the Meteorological Office, and from 1863 to 1867 he was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Using this approach, he helped to demonstrate that fingerprints were an index of personal identity, even persuading Scotland Yard to keep fingerprint records, and he stirred up a statistical controversy with a study that disproved the efficacy of prayer in healing.

Although never as adept mathematically as he would have liked, Galton became a pioneer in the use of regression analysis during the 1870s and introduced the concept of statistical correlation in 1888. In meteorology, his work on atmospheric circulation (including coining the word 'anticyclone') and his use of maps to show high pressure areas were both fundamental to the development of scientific weather forecasting. As an early experimental psychologist, he introduced the survey as a method for data collection, helped to demonstrate that different minds worked in different ways, promoted twin studies, and investigated the nature of memory and the senses. Instead, he threw himself into a variety of scientific pursuits, and above all into quantitative inference. Despite having earned an enviable reputation as an explorer, Damaraland would be Galton's final expedition. Galton failed in this attempt, but his account of that arduous journey, Tropical South Africa (London, 1853), established him as an important explorer and earned him the gold medal of the Royal Geographic Society in 1853, the gold medal of the French Geographical Society in 1854, and election to the Royal Society in 1856. Approaching the Royal Geographic Society, Galton proposed leading an exploring expedition to Damaraland (present day Namibia), hoping to push from Walfish Bay inland to Lake Ngami, a lake which had been seen by Europeans only by David Livingstone. For five years, he dabbled in the sporting life, but after becoming thoroughly bored with leisure, he returned to travel. When his father died in 1844, the same year that he took a poll degree, Galton found himself liberated from the need to work, and almost immediately embarked upon a tour up the Nile as far as Khartoum and from there, to Syria. At his parents' insistence - and having already spent time studying at the General Hospital in Birmingham and at King's College, London - Galton studied medicine at Cambridge. 16, 1822, Galton was still a boy when he was first gripped by a 'passion for travel,' touring eastern Europe and the Levant in the months before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1840.

The polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911) led a privileged and adventurous life, lending his talents to the development of statistical inference, scientific meteorology, psychology, and becoming one of the first to apply the evolutionary theories of his cousin Charles Darwin to human populations, founding the new fields of eugenics and biometrics.

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