A LIFE OF SIR FRANCIS GALTON: From African Explorer to the Birth of Eugenics.(Review)(Brief Article)

NICHOLAS WRIGHT GILLHAM Oxford Univ., $30 (416p) ISBN 0-19-514365-5

This may well prove to be the definitive biography of the British explorer, a cousin and contemporary of Charles Darwin. Gillham, emeritus professor of biology at Duke University, offers an elegant and complete portrait comparable to Janet Browne's acclaimed life of Darwin. Galton is best known as the founder of eugenics, but his interests and subsequent contributions as Victorian traveler and scientist were myriad. Like Darwin, he set out to become a doctor but his curiosity led him further afield -- in Galton's case, to Africa. He won fame for his expedition in Nambia and his subsequent book of …