Part 1 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+fts 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 fas.h.i.+on 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.