Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development Part 1

Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

by Francis Galton.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

After some years had pa.s.sed subsequent to the publication of this book in 1883, its publishers, Messrs. Macmillan, informed me that the demand for it just, but only just warranted a revised issue. I shrank from the great trouble of bringing it up to date because it, or rather many of my memoirs out of which it was built up, had become starting-points for elaborate investigations both in England and in America, to which it would be difficult and very laborious to do justice in a brief compa.s.s. So the question of a Second Edition was then entirely dropped. Since that time the book has by no means ceased to live, for it continues to be quoted from and sought for, but is obtainable only with difficulty, and at much more than its original cost, at sales of second-hand books. Moreover, it became the starting point of that recent movement in favour of National Eugenics (see note p. 24 in first edition) which is recognised by the University of London, and has its home in University College.

Having received a proposal to republish the book in its present convenient and inexpensive form, I gladly accepted it, having first sought and received an obliging a.s.surance from Messrs. Macmillan that they would waive all their claims to the contrary in my favour.

The following small changes are made in this edition. The ill.u.s.trations are for the most part reduced in size to suit the smaller form of the volume, the lettering of the composites is rearranged, and the coloured ill.u.s.tration is reproduced as closely as circ.u.mstances permit. Two chapters are omitted, on "Theocratic Intervention" and on the "Objective Efficacy of Prayer." The earlier part of the latter was too much abbreviated from the original memoir in the _Fortnightly Review_, 1872, and gives, as I now perceive, a somewhat inexact impression of its object, which was to investigate certain views then thought orthodox, but which are growing obsolete.

I could not reinsert these omissions now with advantage, unless considerable additions were made to the references, thus giving more appearance of personal controversy to the memoirs than is desirable.

After all, the omission of these two chapters, in which I find nothing to recant, improves, as I am told, the general balance of the book. FRANCIS GALTON.

LIST OF WORKS.

The Teletype: a printing Electric Telegraph, 1850; The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, 1853, in "Minerva Library of Famous Books," 1889; Notes on Modern Geography (Cambridge Essays, 1855, etc.); Arts of Campaigning: an Inaugural Lecture delivered at Aldershot, 1855; The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances available in Wild Countries, 1855, 1856, 1860 (1859); fourth edition, recast and enlarged, 1867, 1872; Vacation Tourists and Notes on Travel, 1861, 1862, 1864; Meteorographica, or Methods of Mapping the Weather, 1863; Hereditary Genius: an Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences, 1869; English Men of Science: their Nature and Nurture, 1874; Address to the Anthropological Departments of the British a.s.sociation (Plymouth, 1877); Generic Images: with Autotype Ill.u.s.trations (from the Proceedings of the Royal Inst.i.tution), 1879; Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883; Record of Family Faculties, 1884; Natural Inheritance, 1889; Finger-Prints, 1892; Decipherments of Blurred Finger-Prints (supplementary chapters to former work), 1893; Finger-Print Directories, 1895; Introduction to Life of W. Cotton Oswell, 1900; Index to Achievements of Near Kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 1904; Eugenics: its Definition, Scope, and Aims (Sociological Society Papers, vols. I. and II.), 1905; Noteworthy Families (Modern Science); And many papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Journals of the Geographical Society and the Anthropological Inst.i.tute, the Reports of the British a.s.sociation, the Philosophical Magazine, and Nature.

Galton also edited: Hints to Travellers, 1878; Life-History Alb.u.m (British Medical a.s.sociation), 1884, second edition, 1902; Biometrika (edited in consultation with F.G. and W.F.R. Weldon), 1901, etc.; and under his direction was designed a Descriptive List of Anthropometric Apparatus, etc., 1887.

INTRODUCTION.

Since the publication of my work on _Hereditary Genius_ in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces of the fragmentary origin of the work still remain, and I do not regret them. They serve to show that the book is intended to be suggestive, and renounces all claim to be encyclopedic. I have indeed, with that object, avoided going into details in not a few cases where I should otherwise have written with fulness, especially in the Anthropometric part. My general object has been to take note of the varied hereditary faculties of different men, and of the great differences in different families and races, to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course. The subject is, however, so entangled with collateral considerations that a straightforward step-by-step inquiry did not seem to be the most suitable course. I thought it safer to proceed like the surveyor of a new country, and endeavour to fix in the first instance as truly as I could the position of several cardinal points.

The general outline of the results to which I finally arrived became more coherent and clear as this process went on; they are brieflv summarised in the concluding chapter.

VARIETY OF HUMAN NATURE.

We must free our minds of a great deal of prejudice before we can rightly judge of the direction in which different races need to be improved. We must be on our guard against taking our own instincts of what is best and most seemly, as a criterion for the rest of mankind. The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the Zoological Gardens; and however diverse and antagonistic they are, each may be good of its kind. It is obviously so in brutes; the monkey may have a horror at the sight of a snake, and a repugnance to its ways, but a snake is just as perfect an animal as a monkey. The living world does not consist of a repet.i.tion of similar elements, but of an endless variety of them, that have grown, body and soul, through selective influences into close adaptation to their contemporaries, and to the physical circ.u.mstances of the localities they inhabit. The moral and intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious variety of the gifts of the men who compose it, and it would be the very reverse of improvement to make all its members a.s.similate to a common type. However, in every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful. We may, of course, be mistaken about some few of these, and shall find in our fuller knowledge that they subserve the public good in some indirect manner; but, notwithstanding this possibility, we are justified in roundly a.s.serting that the natural characteristics of every human race admit of large improvement in many directions easy to specify.

I do not, however, offer a list of these, but shall confine myself to directing attention to a very few hereditary characteristics of a marked kind, some of which are most desirable and others greatly the reverse; I shall also describe new methods of appraising and defining them. Later on in the book I shall endeavour to define the place and duty of man in the furtherance of the great scheme of evolution, and I shall show that he has already not only adapted circ.u.mstance to race, but also, in some degree and often unconsciously, race to circ.u.mstance; and that his unused powers in the latter direction are more considerable than might have been thought.

It is with the innate moral and intellectual faculties that the book is chiefly concerned, but they are so closely bound up with the physical ones that these must be considered as well. It is, moreover, convenient to take them the first, so I will begin with the features.

FEATURES.

The differences in human features must be reckoned great, inasmuch as they enable us to distinguish a single known face among those of thousands of strangers, though they are mostly too minute for measurement. At the same time, they are exceedingly numerous. The general expression of a face is the sum of a mult.i.tude of small details, which are viewed in such rapid succession that we seem to perceive them all at a single glance. If any one of them disagrees with the recollected traits of a known face, the eye is quick at observing it, and it dwells upon the difference. One small discordance overweighs a mult.i.tude of similarities and suggests a general unlikeness; just as a single syllable in a sentence p.r.o.nounced with a foreign accent makes one cease to look upon the speaker as a countryman. If the first rough sketch of a portrait be correct so far as it goes, it may be p.r.o.nounced an excellent likeness; but a rough sketch does not go far; it contains but few traits for comparison with the original. It is a suggestion, not a likeness; it must be coloured and shaded with many touches before it can really resemble the face, and whilst this is being done the maintenance of the likeness is imperilled at every step. I lately watched an able artist painting a portrait, and endeavoured to estimate the number of strokes with his brush, every one of which was thoughtfully and firmly given. During fifteen sittings of three working hours each--that is to say, during forty-five hours, or two thousand four hundred minutes--he worked at the average rate of ten strokes of the brush per minute. There were, therefore, twenty-four thousand separate traits in the completed portrait, and in his opinion some, I do not say equal, but comparably large number of units of resemblance with the original.

The physiognomical difference between different men being so numerous and small, it is impossible to measure and compare them each to each, and to discover by ordinary statistical methods the true physiognomy of a race. The usual way is to select individuals who are judged to be representatives of the prevalent type, and to photograph them; but this method is not trustworthy, because the judgment itself is fallacious. It is swayed by exceptional and grotesque features more than by ordinary ones, and the portraits supposed to be typical are likely to be caricatures. One fine Sunday afternoon I sat with a friend by the walk in Kensington Gardens that leads to the bridge, and which on such occasions is thronged by promenaders. It was agreed between us that whichever first caught sight of a typical John Bull should call the attention of the other.

We sat and watched keenly for many minutes, but neither of us found occasion to utter a word.

The prevalent type of English face has greatly changed at different periods, for after making large allowance for the fashion in portrait painting of the day, there remains a great difference between the proportion in which certain casts of features are to be met with at different dates. I have spent some time in studying the photographs of the various portraits of English worthies that have been exhibited at successive loan collections, or which are now in the National Portrait Gallery, and have traced what appear to be indisputable signs of one predominant type of face supplanting another. For instance, the features of the men painted by and about the time of Holbein have usually high cheekbones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank dark hair. It would be impossible, I think, for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress themselves and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits.

Englishmen are now a fair and reddish race, as may be seen from the Diagram, taken from the Report of the Anthropometric Committee to the British a.s.sociation in 1880 and which gives the proportion in which the various colours of hair are found among our professional cla.s.ses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ]

I take the professional cla.s.ses because they correspond with the cla.s.s of English worthies better than any of the others from which returns have been collected. The Diagram, however, gives a fair representation of other cla.s.ses of the community. For instance, I have a.n.a.lysed the official records of the very carefully-selected crews of H.M. S. _Alert_ and _Discovery_ in the Arctic Expedition of 1875-6, and find the proportion of various shades of hair to be the same among them as is shown in the Diagram. Seven-tenths of the crews had complexions described as light, fair, fresh, ruddy or freckled, and the same proportion had blue or gray eyes. They would have contrasted strongly with Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, who were recruited from the dark-haired men of the fen districts, and who are said to have left the impression on contemporary observers as being men of a peculiar breed. They would also probably have contrasted with any body of thoroughgoing Puritan soldiers taken at haphazard; for there is a prevalence of dark hair among men of atrabilious and sour temperament.

If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this century must have been prodigious. It testifies to the grosser conditions of life in those days, and makes it improbable that the types best adapted to prevail then would be the best adapted to prevail now.

COMPOSITE PORTRAITURE.

As a means of getting over the difficulty of procuring really representative faces, I contrived the method of composite portraiture, which has been explained of late on many occasions, and of which a full account will be found in Appendix A. The principle on which the composites are made will best be understood by a description of my earlier and now discarded method; it was this--(1) I collected photographic portraits of different persons, all of whom had been photographed in the same aspect (say full face), and under the same conditions of light and shade (say with the light coming from the right side). (2) I reduced their portraits photographically to the same size, being guided as to scale by the distance between any two convenient points of reference in the features; for example, by the vertical distance between two parallel lines, one of which pa.s.sed through the middle of the pupils of the eyes and the other between the lips. (3) I superimposed the portraits like the successive leaves of a book, so that the features of each portrait lay as exactly as the case admitted, in front of those of the one behind it, eye in front of eye and mouth in front of mouth. This I did by holding them successively to the light and adjusting them, then by fastening each to the preceding one with a strip of gummed paper along one of the edges. Thus I obtained a book, each page of which contained a separate portrait, and all the portraits lay exactly in front of one another. (4) I fastened the book against the wall in such a way that I could turn over the pages in succession, leaving in turn each portrait flat and fully exposed. (5) I focused my camera on the book fixed it firmly, and put a sensitive plate inside it. (6) I began photographing, taking one page after the other in succession without moving the camera, but putting on the cap whilst I was turning over the pages, so that an image of each of the portraits in succession was thrown on the same part of the sensitised plate.

Only a fraction of the exposure required to make a good picture was allowed to each portrait. Suppose that period was twenty seconds, and that there were ten portraits, then an exposure of two seconds would be allowed for each portrait, making twenty seconds in all.

This is the principle of the process, the details of that which I now use are different and complex. They are fully explained in the Appendix for the use of those who may care to know about them.

The effect of composite portraiture is to bring into evidence all the traits in which there is agreement, and to leave but a ghost of a trace of individual peculiarities. There are so many traits in common in all faces that the composite picture when made from many components is far from being a blur; it has altogether the look of an ideal composition.

It may be worth mentioning that when I take any small bundle of portraits, selected at hazard, I have generally found it easy to sort them into about five groups, four of which have enough resemblance among themselves to make as many fairly clear composites, while the fifth consists of faces that are too incongruous to be grouped in a single cla.s.s. In dealing with portraits of brothers and sisters, I can generally throw most of them into a single group, with success.

In the small collection of composites given in the Plate facing p. 8, I have purposely selected many of those that I have previously published, and whose originals, on a larger scale, I have at various times exhibited, together with their components, in order to put the genuineness of the results beyond doubt. Those who see them for the first time can hardly believe but that one dominant face has overpowered the rest, and that they are composites only in name. When, however, the details are examined, this objection disappears. It is true that with careless photography one face may be allowed to dominate, but with the care that ought to be taken, and with the precautions described in the Appendix, that does not occur. I have often been amused when showing composites and their components to friends, to hear a strong expression of opinion that the predominance of one face was evident, and then on asking which face it was, to discover that they disagreed. I have even known a composite in which one portrait seemed unduly to prevail, to be remade without the component in question, and the result to be much the same as before, showing that the reason of the resemblance was that the rejected portrait had a close approximation to the ideal average picture of the rest.

These small composites give a better notion of the utmost capacity of the process than the larger ones, from which they are reduced.

In the latter, the ghosts of individual peculiarities are more visible, and usually the equal traces left by every member of a moderately-sized group can be made out by careful inspection; but it is hardly possible to do this in the pictures in the Plate, except in a good light and in a very few of the cases. On the other hand, the larger pictures do not contain more detail of value than the smaller ones.

DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPOSITES.

The medallion of Alexander the Great was made by combining the images of six different medals, with a view of obtaining the type of features that the makers of those medals concurred in desiring to ascribe to him. The originals were kindly selected for me by Mr. R.

Stuart Poole from the collection in the British Museum. This composite was one of the first I ever made, and is printed together with its six components in the _Journal of the Royal Inst.i.tution_, in ill.u.s.tration of a lecture I gave there in April 1879. It seems to me that it is possible on this principle to obtain a truer likeness of a man than in any other way. Every artist makes mistakes; but by combining the conscientious works of many artists, their separate mistakes disappear, and what is common to all of their works remains.

So as regards different photographs of the same person, those accidental momentary expressions are got rid of, which an ordinary photograph made by a brief exposure cannot help recording. On the other hand, any happy sudden trait of expression is lost. The composite gives the features in repose.

The next pair of composites (full face and profile) on the Plate has not been published before. The interest of the pair lies chiefly in their having been made from only two components, and they show how curiously even two faces that have a moderate family likeness will blend into a single one. That neither of these predominated in the present case will be learned from the following letter by the father of the ladies, who is himself a photographer:--

"I am exceedingly obliged for the very curious and interesting composite portraits of my two children. Knowing the faces so well, it caused me quite a surprise when I opened your letter. I put one of the full faces on the table for the mother to pick up casually.

She said, 'When did you do this portrait of A? how _like_ she is to B!

Or _is_ it B? I never thought they were so like before.' It has puzzled several people to say whether the profile was intended for A or B. Then I tried one of them on a friend who has not seen the girls for years. He said, 'Well, it is one of the family for certain, but I don't know which.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: ]

I have made several other family portraits, which to my eye seem great successes, but must candidly own that the persons whose portraits are blended together seldom seem to care much for the result, except as a curiosity. We are all inclined to a.s.sert our individuality, and to stand on our own basis, and to object to being mixed up indiscriminately with others. The same feeling finds expression when the resident in a suburban street insists on calling his house a villa with some fantastic name, and refuses, so long as he can, to call it simply Number so and so in the street.

The last picture in the upper row shows the easy way in which young and old, male and female, combine to form an effective picture. The components consist in this case of the father and mother, two sons, and two daughters. I exhibited the original of this, together with the portraits from which it was taken, at the Loan Photographic Exhibition at the Society of Arts in February 1882. I also sent copies of the original of this same composite to several amateur photographers, with a circular letter asking them to get from me family groups for the purpose of experiments, to see how far the process was suitable for family portraiture.