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The Galton-Kőrösi Correspondence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Alan S. Parkes
Affiliation:
Galton Foundation, London

Extract

In December last year I received a letter from Dr Egon Szabady, Director of the Demographic Research Institute in Budapest, Hungary, calling my attention to the publication by the Institute of the abstracts of papers given at the 9th Hungarian Congress of Biology held in May 1970. Dr Szabady also enclosed a copy of the script of his opening address at the Congress, Population Science and Human Biology, in which he referred to letters which passed between Francis Galton and Jozsef Kórösi between 1894 and 1897, and a reprint of his paper, published in Demographia 1970, which gives a full account, with some facsimiles, of this correspondence. On inquiry, I found that this contact between these two great men of science had attracted little attention—Pearson's massive biography of Galton contains only two references to Kórösi, one to isogens constructed by Galton from Kórösi's Budapest data and the other to Kórösi's death. I wrote, therefore, to Dr Szabady asking permission to use his material in a note in JBS. In reply, Dr Szabady not only gave me his permission and that of the library of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office which holds the originals, but also sent me photographs of two postcards and two short letters not included, either in print or facsimile, in his Demographia paper. Additionaly, he sent me photographs of the two letters from Kórösi to Galton, published in print in Demographia, explaining that the copies held by the library of the Central Statistical Office were Blurred Because of being made by Kórösi on very thin paper. However, they showed, what I had not previously realized, that Kórösi's letters were written in English. I am most grateful to Dr Szabady for this courtesy.

Type
Historical Note
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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