In the 1999 Galton Lecture for the annual conference of The Galton Institute, the author summarizes the main elements of Galton’s ideas about human mental ability and the research paradigm they generated, including the concept of ‘general’ mental ability, its hereditary component, its physical basis, racial differences, and methods for measuring individual differences in general ability. Although the conclusions Galton drew from his empirical studies were seldom compelling for lack of the needed technology and methods of statistical inference in his day, contemporary research has generally borne out most of Galton’s original and largely intuitive ideas, which still inspire mainstream scientific research on intelligence.