Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton Francis
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.
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 repetition 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 circumstances 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 assimilate 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 asserting 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 circumstance to race, but also, in some degree and often unconsciously, race to circumstance; 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.
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 multitude 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 multitude of similarities and suggests a general unlikeness; just as a single syllable in a sentence pronounced 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 pronounced 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 Association in 1880 and which gives the proportion in which the various colours of hair are found among our professional classes.
I take the professional classes because they correspond with the class of English worthies better than any of the others from which returns have been collected. The Diagram, however, gives a fair representation of other classes of the community. For instance, I have analysed 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