Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
The next is a series of four composites. The first consists of 57
hospital patients suffering under one or other of the many forms of
consumption. I may say that, with the aid of Dr. Mahomed, I am
endeavouring to utilise this process to elicit the physiognomy of
disease. The composite I now show is what I call a hotch-pot
composite; its use is to form a standard whence deviations towards
any particular sub-type may be conveniently gauged. It will be
observed that the face is strongly marked, and that it is quite
idealised. I claim for composite portraiture, that it affords a
method of obtaining _pictorial averages_, which effects
simultaneously for every point in a picture what a method of numerical
averages would do for each point in the picture separately. It
gives, in short, the average tint of every unit of area in the
picture, measured from the fiducial lines as co-ordinates. Now every
statistician knows, by experience, that numerical averages usually
begin to agree pretty fairly when we deal with even twenty or thirty
cases. Therefore we should expect to find that any groups of twenty
or thirty men of the same class would yield composites bearing a
considerable likeness to one another. In proof that this is the case,
I exhibit three other composites: the one is made from the first 28
portraits of the 57, the second from the last 27, and the third is
made from 36 portraits taken indiscriminately out of the 57. It will
be observed that all the four composites are closely alike.
I will now show a few typical portraits I selected out of 82 male
portraits of a different series of consumptive male patients; they
were those that had more or less of a particular wan look, that I
wished to elicit. The selected cases were about 18 in number, and
from these I took 12, rejecting about six as having some marked
peculiarity that did not conform well with the remaining 12. The
result is a very striking face, thoroughly ideal and artistic, and
singularly beautiful. It is, indeed, most notable how beautiful all
composites are. Individual peculiarities are all irregularities, and
the composite is always regular.
I show a composite of 15 female faces, also of consumptive patients,
that gives somewhat the same aspect of the disease; also two others
of only 6 in each, that have in consequence less of an ideal look,
but which are still typical. I have here several other typical faces
in my collection of composites; they are all serviceable as
illustrations of this memoir, but, medically speaking, they are only
provisional results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account