Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development Part 2

The general intention of this chapter has been to show that a delicate power of sense discrimination is an attribute of a high race, and that it has not the drawback of being necessarily a.s.sociated with nervous irritability.

SEQUENCE OF TEST WEIGHTS.

I will now describe an apparatus I have constructed to test the delicacy with which weights may be discriminated by handling them. I do so because the principle on which it is based may be adopted in apparatus for testing other senses, and its description and the conditions of its use will ill.u.s.trate the desiderata and difficulties of all such investigations.

A series of test weights is a simple enough idea--the difficulty lies in determining the particular sequence of weights that should be employed. Mine form a geometric series, for the reason that when stimuli of all kinds increase by geometric grades the sensations they give rise to will increase by arithmetic grades, so long as the stimulus is neither so weak as to be barely felt, nor so strong as to excite fatigue. My apparatus, which is explained more fully in the Appendix, consists of a number of common gun cartridge cases filled with alternate layers of shot, wool, and wadding, and then closed in the usual way. They are all identical in appearance, and may be said to differ only in their specific gravities. They are marked in numerical sequence with the register numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc., but their weights are proportioned to the numbers of which 1, 2, 3, etc., are the logarithms, and consequently run in a geometric series.

Hence the numbers of the weights form a scale of equal degrees of sensitivity. If a person can just distinguish between the weights numbered 1 and 3, he can also just distinguish between 2 and 4, 3 and 5, and any other pair of weights of which the register number of the one exceeds that of the other by 2. Again, his coa.r.s.eness of discrimination is exactly double of that of another person who can just distinguish pairs of weights differing only by 1, such as 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and so on. The testing is performed by handing pairs of weights to the operatee until his power of discrimination is approximately made out, and then to proceed more carefully. It is best now, for reasons stated in the Appendix, to hand to the operatee sequences of three weights at a time, after shuffling them.

These he has to arrange in their proper order, with his eyes shut, and by the sense of their weight alone. The operator finally records the scale interval that the operatee can just appreciate, as being the true measure of the coa.r.s.eness (or the inverse measure of the delicacy) of the sensitivity of the operatee.

It is somewhat tedious to test many persons in succession, but any one can test his own powers at odd and end times with ease and nicety, if he happens to have ready access to suitable apparatus.

The use of tests, which, objectively speaking, run in a geometric series, and subjectively in an arithmetic one, may be applied to touch, by the use of wire-work of various degrees of fineness; to taste, by stock bottles of solutions of salt, etc., of various strengths; to smell, by bottles of attar of rose, etc., in various degrees of dilution.

The tests show the sensitivity at the time they are made, and give an approximate measure of the discrimination with which the operatee habitually employs his senses. It does not measure his capacity for discrimination, because the discriminative faculty admits of much education, and the test results always show increased delicacy after a little practice. However, the requirements of everyday life educate all our faculties in some degree, and I have not found the performances with test weights to improve much after a little familiarity with their use. The weights have, as it were, to be played with at first, then they must be tried carefully on three or four separate occasions.

I did not at first find it at all an easy matter to make test weights so alike as to differ in no other appreciable respect than in their specific gravity, and if they differ and become known apart, the knowledge so acquired will vitiate future judgments in various indirect ways. Similarity in outward shape and touch was ensured by the use of mechanically-made cartridge cases; dissimilarity through any external stain was rendered of no hindrance to the experiment by making the operatee handle them in a bag or with his eyes shut. Two bodies may, however, be alike in weight and outward appearance and yet behave differently when otherwise mechanically tested, and, consequently, when they are handled. For example, take two eggs, one raw and the other hard boiled, and spin them on the table; press the finger for a moment upon either of them whilst it is still spinning: if it be the hard-boiled egg it will stop as dead as a stone: if it be the raw egg, after a little apparent hesitation, it will begin again to rotate. The motion of its sh.e.l.l had alone been stopped; the internal part was still rotating and this compelled the sh.e.l.l to follow it. Owing to this cause, when we handle the two eggs, the one feels "quick" and the other does not. Similarly with the cartridges, when one is rather more loosely packed than the others the difference is perceived on handling them. Or it may have one end heavier than the other, or else its weight may not be equally distributed round its axis, causing it to rest on the table with the same part always lowermost; differences due to these causes are also easily perceived when handling the cartridges. Again, one of two similar cartridges may balance perfectly in all directions, but the weight of one of them may be disposed too much towards the ends, as in a dumb-bell, or gathered too much towards the centre. The period of oscillation will differ widely in the two cases, as may be shown by suspending the cartridges by strings round their middle so that they shall hang horizontally, and then by a slight tap making them spin to and fro round the string as an axis.

The touch is very keen in distinguishing all these peculiarities. I have mentioned them, and might have added more, to show that experiments on sensitivity have to be made in the midst of pitfalls warily to be avoided. Our apparently simplest perceptions are very complex. We hardly ever act on the information given by only one element of one sense, and our sensitivity in any desired direction cannot be rightly determined except by carefully-devised apparatus judiciously used.

WHISTLES FOR AUDIBILITY OF SHRILL NOTES.

I contrived a small whistle for conveniently ascertaining the upper limits of audible sound in different persons, which Dr. Wollaston had shown to vary considerably. He used small pipes, and found much difficulty in making them. I made a very small whistle from a bra.s.s tube whose internal diameter was less than one-tenth of an inch in diameter. A plug was fitted into the lower end of the tube, which could be pulled out or pushed in as much as desired, thereby causing the length of the bore of the whistle to be varied at will. When the bore is long the note is low; when short, it is high. The plug was graduated, so that the precise note produced by the whistle could be determined by reading off the graduations and referring to a table.

(See Appendix.)

On testing different persons, I found there was a remarkable falling off in the power of hearing high notes as age advanced. The persons themselves were quite unconscious of their deficiency so long as their sense of hearing low notes remained unimpaired. It is an only too amusing experiment to test a party of persons of various ages, including some rather elderly and self-satisfied personages. They are indignant at being thought deficient in the power of hearing, yet the experiment quickly shows that they are absolutely deaf to shrill notes which the younger persons hear acutely, and they commonly betray much dislike to the discovery. Every one has his limit, and the limit at which sounds become too shrill to be audible to any particular person can be rapidly determined by this little instrument.

Lord Rayleigh and others have found that sensitive flames are powerfully affected by the vibrations of whistles that are too rapid to be audible to ordinary ears.

I have tried experiments with all kinds of animals on their powers of hearing shrill notes. I have gone through the whole of the Zoological Gardens, using an apparatus arranged for the purpose. It consists of one of my little whistles at the end of a walking-stick--that is, in reality, a long tube; it has a bit of india-rubber pipe under the handle, a sudden squeeze upon which forces a little air into the whistle and causes it to sound. I hold it as near as is safe to the ears of the animals, and when they are quite accustomed to its presence and heedless of it, I make it sound; then if they p.r.i.c.k their ears it shows that they hear the whistle; if they do not, it is probably inaudible to them. Still, it is very possible that in some cases they hear but do not heed the sound. Of all creatures, I have found none superior to cats in the power of hearing shrill sounds; it is perfectly remarkable what a faculty they have in this way. Cats, of course, have to deal in the dark with mice, and to find them out by their squealing. Many people cannot hear the shrill squeal of a mouse. Some time ago, singing mice were exhibited in London, and of the people who went to hear them, some could hear nothing, whilst others could hear a little, and others again could hear much. Cats are differentiated by natural selection until they have a power of hearing all the high notes made by mice and other little creatures that they have to catch. A cat that is at a very considerable distance, can be made to turn its ear round by sounding a note that is too shrill to be audible by almost any human ear. Small dogs also hear very shrill notes, but large ones do not. I have walked through the streets of a town with an instrument like that which I used in the Zoological Gardens, and made nearly all the little dogs turn round, but not the large ones.

At Berne, where there appear to be more large dogs lying idly about the streets than in any other town in Europe, I have tried the whistle for hours together, on a great many large dogs, but could not find one that heard it. Ponies are sometimes able to hear very high notes. I once frightened a pony with one of these whistles in the middle of a large field. My attempts on insect hearing have been failures.

ANTHROPOMETRIC REGISTERS.

When shall we have anthropometric laboratories, where a man may, when he pleases, get himself and his children weighed, measured, and rightly photographed, and have their bodily faculties tested by the best methods known to modern science? The records of growth of numerous persons from childhood to age are required before it can be possible to rightly appraise the effect of external conditions upon development, and records of this kind are at present non-existent.

The various measurements should be accompanied by photographic studies of the features in full face and in profile, and on the same scale, for convenience of comparison.

We are all lazy in recording facts bearing on ourselves, but parents are glad enough to do so in respect to their children, and they would probably be inclined to avail themselves of a laboratory where all that is required could be done easily and at small cost. These domestic records would hereafter become of considerable biographical interest. Every one of us in his mature age would be glad of a series of pictures of himself from childhood onwards, accompanied by physical records, and arranged consecutively with notes of current events by their sides. Much more would he be glad of similar collections referring to his father, mother, grandparents, and other near relatives. It would be peculiarly grateful to the young to possess likenesses of their parents and those whom they look upon as heroes, taken when they were of the same age as themselves. Boys are too apt to think of their parents as having always been elderly men, because they have insufficient data to construct imaginary pictures of them as they were in their youth.

The cost of taking photographs in batches is so small, and the time occupied is so brief, when the necessary preparations have been made and the sitters are ready at hand, that a practice of methodically photographing schoolboys and members of other large inst.i.tutions might easily be established. I, for one, should dearly prize the opportunity of visiting the places where I have been educated, and of turning over pages showing myself and my companions as we were in those days. But no such records exist; the inst.i.tutions last and flourish, the individuals who pa.s.s through them are dispersed and leave few or no memorials behind. It seems a cruel waste of opportunity not to make and keep these brief personal records in a methodical manner. The fading of ordinary photographic prints is no real objection to keeping a register, because they can now be reproduced at small charge in permanent printers' ink, by the autotype and other processes.

I have seen with admiration, and have had an opportunity of availing myself of, the newly-established library of well-ordered folios at the Admiralty, each containing a thousand pages, and each page containing a brief summary of references to the life of a particular seaman. There are already 80,000 pages, and owing to the excellent organisation of the office it is a matter of perfect ease to follow out any one of these references, and to learn every detail of the service of any seaman. A brief register of measurements and events in the histories of a large number of persons, previous to their entering any inst.i.tution and during their residence in it, need not therefore be a difficult matter to those who may take it in hand seriously and methodically.

The recommendation I would venture to make to my readers is to obtain photographs and ordinary measurements periodically of themselves and their children, making it a family custom to do so, because, unless driven by some custom, the act will be postponed until the opportunity is lost. Let those periodical photographs be full and side views of the face on an adequate scale, adding any others that may be wished, but not omitting these. As the portraits acc.u.mulate have collections of them autotyped. Keep the prints methodically in a family register, writing by their side careful chronicles of illness and all such events as used to find a place on the fly-leaf of the Bible of former generations, and inserting other interesting personal facts and whatever anthropometric data can be collected.

Those who care to initiate and carry on a family chronicle ill.u.s.trated by abundant photographic portraiture, will produce a work that they and their children and their descendants in more remote generations will a.s.suredly be grateful for. The family tie has a real as well as a traditional significance. The world is beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His vigour, his character, and his diseases are princ.i.p.ally derived from theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities; but more frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one or other of them showing now here and now there. The life-histories of our relatives are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more instructive to us than those of strangers, far more fitted to encourage and to forewarn us. If there be such a thing as a natural birthright, I can conceive of none superior to the right of the child to be informed, at first by proxy through his guardians, and afterwards personally, of the life-history, medical and other, of his ancestry. The child is thrust into existence without his having any voice at all in the matter, and the smallest amend that those who brought him here can make, is to furnish him with all the guidance they can, including the complete life-histories of his near progenitors.

The investigation of human eugenics--that is, of the conditions under which men of a high type are produced--is at present extremely hampered by the want of full family histories, both medical and general, extending over three or four generations. There is no such difficulty in investigating animal eugenics, because the generations of horses, cattle, dogs, etc., are brief, and the breeder of any such stock lives long enough to acquire a large amount of experience from his own personal observation. A man, however, can rarely be familiar with more than two or three generations of his contemporaries before age has begun to check his powers; his working experience must therefore be chiefly based upon records. Believing, as I do, that human eugenics will become recognised before long as a study of the highest practical importance, it seems to me that no time ought to be lost in encouraging and directing a habit of compiling personal and family histories. If the necessary materials be brought into existence, it will require no more than zeal and persuasiveness on the part of the future investigator to collect as large a store of them as he may require.

UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF PECULIARITIES.

The importance of submitting our faculties to measurement lies in the curious unconsciousness in which we are apt to live of our personal peculiarities, and which our intimate friends often fail to remark. I have spoken of the ignorance of elderly persons of their deafness to high notes, but even the existence of such a peculiarity as colour blindness was not suspected until the memoir of Dalton in 1794. That one person out of twenty-nine or thereabouts should be unable to distinguish a red from a green, without knowing that he had any deficiency of colour sense, and without betraying his deficiency to his friends, seems perfectly incredible to the other twenty-eight; yet as a matter of fact he rarely does either the one or the other. It is hard to convince the colour-blind of their own infirmity. I have seen curious instances of this: one was that of a person by no means unpractised in physical research, who had been himself tested in matching colours. He gave me his own version of the result, to the effect that though he might perhaps have fallen a little short of perfection as judged by over-refined tests, his colour sense was for all practical purposes quite good. On the other hand, the operator a.s.sured me that when he had toned the intensities of a pure red and a pure green in a certain proportion, the person ceased to be able to distinguish between them! Colour blindness is often very difficult to detect, because the test hues and tints may be discriminated by other means than by the normal colour sense.

Ordinary pigments are never pure, and the test colours may be distinguished by those of their advent.i.tious hues to which the partly colour-blind man may be sensitive. We do not suspect ourselves to be yellow-blind by candle light, because we enjoy pictures in the evening nearly or perhaps quite as much as in the day time; yet we may observe that a yellow primrose laid on the white table-cloth wholly loses its colour by candle light, and becomes as white as a snowdrop.

In the inquiries I made on the hereditary transmission of capacity, I was often amused by the nave remark of men who had easily distanced their compet.i.tors, that they ascribed their success to their own exertions. They little recognised how much they owed to their natural gifts of exceptional capacity and energy on the one hand, and of exceptional love for their special work on the other.

In future chapters I shall give accounts of persons who have unusual mental characteristics as regards imagery, visualised numerals, colours connected with sounds and special a.s.sociations of ideas, being unconscious of their peculiarities; but I cannot antic.i.p.ate these subjects here, as they all require explanation. It will be seen in the end how greatly metaphysicians and psychologists may err, who a.s.sume their own mental operations, instincts, and axioms to be identical with those of the rest of mankind, instead of being special to themselves. The differences between men are profound, and we can only be saved from living in blind unconsciousness of our own mental peculiarities by the habit of informing ourselves as well as we can of those of others. Examples of the success with which this can be done will be found farther on in the book.

I may take this opportunity of remarking on the well-known hereditary character of colour blindness in connection with the fact, that it is nearly twice as prevalent among the Quakers as among the rest of the community, the proportions being as 5.9 to 3.5 per cent.

[1] We might have expected an even larger ratio. Nearly every Quaker is descended on both sides solely from members of a group of men and women who segregated themselves from the rest of the world five or six generations ago; one of their strongest opinions being that the fine arts were worldly snares, and their most conspicuous practice being to dress in drabs. A born artist could never have consented to separate himself from his fellows on such grounds; he would have felt the profession of those opinions [5] and their accompanying practices to be a treason to his aesthetic nature. Consequently few of the original stock of Quakers are likely to have had the temperament that is a.s.sociated with a love for colour, and it is in consequence most reasonable to believe that a larger proportion of colour-blind men would have been found among them than among the rest of the population.

[Footnote 5: _Trans. Ophthalmological Soc_., 1881, p. 198.]

Again, Quakerism is a decreasing sect, weakened by yearly desertions and losses, especially as the act of marriage with a person who is not a member of the Society is necessarily followed by exclusion from it. It is most probable that a large proportion of the deserters would be those who, through reversion to some bygone ancestor, had sufficient artistic taste to make a continuance of Quaker practices too irksome to be endured. Hence the existing members of the Society of Friends are a race who probably contained in the first instance an unduly large proportion of colour-blind men, and from whose descendants many of those who were not born colour blind have year by year been drafted away. Both causes must have combined with the already well-known tendency of colour blindness to hereditary transmission, to cause it to become a characteristic of their race. Dalton, who first discovered its existence, as a personal peculiarity of his own, was a Quaker to his death; Young, the discoverer of the undulatory theory of light, and who wrote specially on colours, was a Quaker by birth, but he married outside the body and so ceased to belong to it.

STATISTICAL METHODS.

The object of statistical science is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion. The possibility of doing this is based on the constancy and continuity with which objects of the same species are found to vary. That is to say, we always find, after sorting any large number of such objects in the order (let us suppose) of their lengths, beginning with the shortest and ending with the tallest, and setting them side by side like a long row of park palings between the same limits, their upper outline will be identical. Moreover, it will run smoothly and not in irregular steps. The theoretical interpretation of the smoothness of outline is that the individual differences in the objects are caused by different combinations of a large number of minute influences; and as the difference between any two adjacent objects in a long row must depend on the absence in one of them of some single influence, or of only a few such, that were present in the other, the amount of difference will be insensible. Whenever we find on trial that the outline of the row is not a flowing curve, the presumption is that the objects are not all of the same species, but that part are affected by some large influence from which the others are free; consequently there is a confusion of curves. This presumption is never found to be belied.

It is unfortunate for the peace of mind of the statistician that the influences by which the magnitudes, etc., of the objects are determined can seldom if ever be roundly cla.s.sed into large and small, without intermediates. He is tantalised by the hope of getting hold of sub-groups of sufficient size that shall contain no individuals except those belonging strictly to the same species, and he is almost constantly baffled. In the end he is obliged to exercise his judgment as to the limit at which he should cease to subdivide. If he subdivides very frequently, the groups become too small to have statistical value; if less frequently, the groups will be less truly specific.

A species may be defined as a group of objects whose individual differences are wholly due to different combinations of the same set of minute causes, no one of which is so powerful as to be able by itself to make any sensible difference in the result. A well-known mathematical consequence flows from this, which is also universally observed as a fact, namely, that in all species the number of individuals who differ from the average value, up to any given amount, is much greater than the number who differ more than that amount, and up to the double of it. In short, if an a.s.sorted series be represented by upright lines arranged side by side along a horizontal base at equal distances apart, and of lengths proportionate to the magnitude of the quality in the corresponding objects, then their shape will always resemble that shown in Fig. 1.

The form of the bounding curve resembles that which is called in architectural language an ogive, from "augive," an old French word for a cup, the figure being not unlike the upper half of a cup lying sideways with its axis horizontal. In consequence of the mult.i.tude of mediocre values, we always find that on either side of the middlemost ordinate _Cc_, which is the median value and may be accepted as the average, there is a much less rapid change of height than elsewhere. If the figure were pulled out sideways to make it accord with such physical conceptions as that of a row of men standing side by side, the middle part of the curve would be apparently horizontal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2.]

The mathematical conception of the curve is best expressed in Fig. 2, where PQ represents any given deviation from the average value, and the ratio of PO to AB represents the relative probability of its occurrence. The equation to the curve and a discussion of its properties will be found in the _Proceedings of the Royal Society_, No. 198, 1879, by Dr. M'Alister. The t.i.tle of the paper is the "Law of the Geometric Mean," and it follows one by myself on "The Geometric Mean in Vital and Social Statistics."

We can lay down the ogive of any quality, physical or mental, whenever we are capable of judging which of any two members of the group we are engaged upon has the larger amount of that quality. I have called this the method of statistics by intercomparison. There is no bodily or mental attribute in any race of individuals that can be so dealt with, whether our judgment in comparing them be guided by common-sense observation or by actual measurement, which cannot be gripped and consolidated into an ogive with a smooth outline, and thenceforward be treated in discussion as a single object.

It is easy to describe any given ogive which has been based upon measurements, so that it may be drawn from the description with approximate truth. Divide AB into a convenient number of fractional parts, and record the height of the ordinates at those parts. In reproducing the ogive from these data, draw a base line of any convenient length, divide it in the same number of fractional parts, erect ordinates of the stated lengths at those parts, connect their tops with a flowing line, and the thing is done. The most convenient fractional parts are the middle (giving the median), the outside quarters (giving the upper and lower quartiles), and similarly the upper and lower octiles or deciles. This is sufficient for most purposes. It leaves only the outer eighths or tenths of the cases undescribed and undetermined, except so far as may be guessed by, the run of the intermediate portion of the curve, and it defines all of the intermediate portion with as close an, approximation as is needed for ordinary or statistical purposes.