by the thousand, while making experiments with composites, I have
been struck by certain general impressions. The consumptive patients
consisted of many hundred cases, including a considerable proportion
of very ignoble specimens of humanity. Some were scrofulous and
misshapen, or suffered from various loathsome forms of inherited
disease; most were ill nourished. Nevertheless, in studying their
portraits the pathetic interest prevailed, and I returned day after
day to my tedious work of classification, with a liking for my
materials. It was quite otherwise with the criminals. I did not
adequately appreciate the degradation of their expressions for some
time; at last the sense of it took firm hold of me, and I cannot now
handle the portraits without overcoming by an effort the aversion
they suggest.
I am sure that the method of composite portraiture opens a fertile
field of research to ethnologists, but I find it very difficult to
do much single-handed, on account of the difficulty of obtaining the
necessary materials. As a rule, the individuals must be specially
photographed. The portraits made by artists are taken in every
conceivable aspect and variety of light and shade, but for the
purpose in question the aspect and the shade must be the same
throughout. Group portraits would do to work from, were it not for
the strong out-of-door light under which they are necessarily taken,
which gives an unwonted effect to the expression of the faces. Their
scale also is too small to give a sufficiently clear picture when
enlarged. I may say that the scale of the portraits need not be
uniform, as my apparatus enlarges or reduces as required, at the
same time that it superposes the images; but the portraits of the
heads should never be less than twice the size of that of the Queen
on a halfpenny piece.
I heartily wish that amateur photographers would seriously take up
the subject of composite portraiture as applied to different
sub-types of the varying races of men. I have already given more
time to perfecting the process and experimenting with it than I can
well spare.
BODILY QUALITIES.
The differences in the bodily qualities that are the usual subjects
of anthropometry are easily dealt with, and are becoming widely
registered in many countries. We are unfortunately destitute of
trustworthy measurements of Englishmen of past generations to enable
us to compare class with class, and to learn how far the several
sections of the English nation may be improving or deteriorating. We
shall, however, hand useful information concerning our own times to
our successors, thanks principally to the exertions of an
Anthropometric Committee established five years ago by the British
Association, who have collected and partly classified and published
a large amount of facts, besides having induced several institutions,
such as Marlborough College, to undertake a regular system of
anthropometric record. I am not, however, concerned here with the
labours of this committee, nor with the separate valuable
publications of some of its members, otherwise than in one small
particular which appears to show that the English population as a
whole, or perhaps I should say the urban portion of it, is in some
sense deteriorating. It is that the average stature of the older
persons measured by or for the committee has not been found to
decrease steadily with their age, but sometimes the reverse.[1] This
contradicts observations made on the heights of the same men at
different periods, whose stature after middle age is invariably
reduced by the shrinking of the cartilages. The explanation offered
was that the statistical increase of stature with age should be
ascribed to the survival of the more stalwart. On reconsideration, I
am inclined to doubt the adequacy of the explanation, and partly to
account for the fact by a steady, slight deterioration of stature in
successive years; in the urban population owing to the conditions of
their lives, and in the rural population owing to the continual
draining away of the more stalwart of them to the towns.
It cannot be doubted that town life is harmful to the town population.
I have myself investigated its effect on fertility (see Appendix B),
and found that taking on the one hand a number of rural parishes,
and on the other hand the inhabitants of a medium town, the former
reared, nearly twice as many adult grandchildren as the latter. The
vital functions are so closely related that an inferiority in the
production of healthy children very probably implies a loss of
vigour generally, one sign of which is a diminution of stature.
Though the bulk of the population may deteriorate, there are many
signs that the better housed and fed portion of it improves. In the
earlier years of this century the so-called manly sports of boxing
and other feats of strength ranked high among the national amusements.
A man who was [1] successful in these became the hero of a large and
demonstrative circle of admirers, and it is to be presumed that the
best boxer, the best pedestrian, and so forth, was the best adapted
to succeed, through his natural physical gifts. If he was not the
most gifted man in those respects in the whole kingdom, he was
certainly one of the most gifted of them. It therefore does no
injustice to the men of that generation to compare the feats of
their foremost athletes with those of ours who occupy themselves in
the same way. The comparison would probably err in their favour,
because the interest in the particular feats in which our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers delighted are not those that
chiefly interest the present generation, and notwithstanding our
increased population, there are fewer men now who attempt them. In
the beginning of this century there were many famous walking matches,
and incomparably the best walker was Captain Barclay of Ury. His
paramount feat, which was once very familiar to the elderly men of
the present time, was that of walking a thousand miles in a thousand
hours, but of late years that feat has been frequently equalled and
overpassed. I am willing to allow much influence to the modern
conditions of walking under shelter and subject to improved methods
of training (Captain Barclay himself originated the first method,
which has been greatly improved since his time); still the fact
remains that in executing this particular feat, the athletes of the
present day are more successful than those who lived some eighty
years ago. I may be permitted to give an example bearing on the
increased stature of the better housed and fed portion of the nation,
in a recollection of my own as to the difference in height between
myself and my fellow-collegians at Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1840-4. My height is 5 feet 9-3/4 inches, and I recollect perfectly
that among the crowd of undergraduates I stood somewhat taller than
the majority. I generally looked a little downward when I met their
eyes. In later years, whenever I have visited Cambridge, I have
lingered in the ante-chapel and repeated the comparison, and now I
find myself decidedly shorter than the average of the students. I
have precisely the same kind of recollection and the same present
experience of the height of crowds of well-dressed persons. I used
always to get a fair view of what was going on over or between their
heads; I rarely can do so now.
[Footnote 1: _Trans. Brit. Assoc_., 1881, Table V., p. 242; and
remarks by Mr. Roberts, p. 235.]
The athletic achievements at school and college are much superior to
what they used to be. Part is no doubt due to more skilful methods
of execution, but not all. I cannot doubt that the more wholesome
and abundant food, the moderation in drink, the better cooking, the
warmer wearing apparel, the airier sleeping rooms, the greater
cleanliness, the more complete change in holidays, and the healthier
lives led by the women in their girlhood, who become mothers
afterwards, have a great influence for good on the favoured portion
of our race.
The proportion of weakly and misshapen individuals is not to be
estimated by those whom we meet in the streets; the worst cases are
out of sight. We should parade before our mind's eye the inmates of
the lunatic, idiot, and pauper asylums, the prisoners, the patients
in hospitals, the sufferers at home, the crippled, and the
congenitally blind, and that large class of more or less wealthy
persons who flee to the sunnier coasts of England, or expatriate
themselves for the chance of life. There can hardly be a sadder
sight than the crowd of delicate English men and women with narrow
chests and weak chins, scrofulous, and otherwise gravely affected,
who are to be found in some of these places. Even this does not tell
the whole of the story; if there were a conscription in England, we
should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men
who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for
military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly
through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of
animals, whether wild or domestic.
It is, however, by no means the most shapely or the biggest
personages who endure hardship the best. Some very shabby-looking
men have extraordinary stamina. Sickly-looking and puny residents in
towns may have a more suitable constitution for the special
conditions of their lives, and may in some sense be better knit and
do more work and live longer than much haler men imported to the
same locality from elsewhere. A wheel and a barrel seem to have the
flimsiest possible constitutions; they consist of numerous separate
pieces all oddly shaped, which, when lying in a heap, look
hopelessly unfitted for union; but put them properly together,
compress them with a tire in the one case and with hoops in the other,
and a remarkably enduring organisation will result. A wheel with a
ton weight on the top of it in the waggons of South Africa will jolt
for thousands of miles over stony, roadless country without
suffering harm; a keg of water may be strapped on the back of a
pack-ox or a mule, and be kicked off and trampled on, and be
otherwise misused for years, without giving way.
I do not propose to enter further into the anthropometric
differences of race, for the subject is a very large one, and this
book does not profess to go into detail. Its intention is to touch
on various topics more or less connected with that of the
cultivation of race, or, as we might call it, with "eugenic" [1]
questions, and to present the results of several of my own separate
investigations.
ENERGY.
Energy is the capacity for labour. It is consistent with all the
robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. It is
the measure of fulness of life; the more energy the more abundance
of it; no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless. In
the inquiries I made on the antecedents of men of science no points
came out more strongly than that the leaders of scientific thought
were generally gifted with remarkable energy, and that they had
[2] inherited the gift of it from their parents and grandparents. I
have since found the same to be the case in other careers.
[Footnote 2: That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in
Greek, _eugenes_, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with
noble qualities. This, and the allied words, _eugeneia_, etc., are
equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a
brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no
means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which,
especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences
that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable
races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily
over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word
_eugenics_ would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a
neater word and a more generalised one than _viriculture_, which I
once ventured to use.]
Energy is an attribute of the higher races, being favoured beyond
all other qualities by natural selection. We are goaded into
activity by the conditions and struggles of life. They afford
stimuli that oppress and worry the weakly, who complain and bewail,
and it may be succumb to them, but which the energetic man welcomes
with a good-humoured shrug, and is the better for in the end.
The stimuli may be of any description: the only important matter is
that all the faculties should be kept working to prevent their
perishing by disuse. If the faculties are few, very simple stimuli
will suffice. Even that of fleas will go a long way. A dog is
continually scratching himself, and a bird pluming itself, whenever
they are not occupied with food, hunting, fighting, or love. In
those blank times there is very little for them to attend to besides
their varied cutaneous irritations. It is a matter of observation
that well washed and combed domestic pets grow dull; they miss the
stimulus of fleas. If animals did not prosper through the agency of
their insect plagues, it seems probable that their races would long
since have been so modified that their bodies should have ceased to
afford a pasture-ground for parasites.
It does not seem to follow that because men are capable of doing
hard work they like it. Some, indeed, fidget and fret if they cannot
otherwise work off their superfluous steam; but on the other hand
there are many big lazy fellows who will not get up their steam to
full pressure except under compulsion. Again, the character of the
stimulus that induces hard work differs greatly in different persons;
it may be wealth, ambition, or other object of passion. The solitary
hard workers, under no encouragement or compulsion except their
sense of duty to their generation, are unfortunately still rare
among us.
It may be objected that if the race were too healthy and energetic
there would be insufficient call for the exercise of the pitying and
self-denying virtues, and the character of men would grow harder in
consequence. But it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly
breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes
is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages. There is
little fear that misery will ever cease from the land, or that the
compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at
present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is
overstocked and overburdened with the listless and the incapable.
In any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to
favour; it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, and it
is eminently transmissible by descent.
SENSITIVITY.
The only information that reaches us concerning outward events
appears to pass through the avenue of our senses; and the more
perceptive the senses are of difference, the larger is the field
upon which our judgment and intelligence can act. Sensation mounts
through a series of grades of "just perceptible differences." It
starts from the zero of consciousness, and it becomes more intense
as the stimulus increases (though at a slower rate) up to the point
when the stimulus is so strong as to begin to damage the nerve
apparatus. It then yields place to pain, which is another form of
sensation, and which continues until the nerve apparatus is destroyed.
Two persons may be equally able just to hear the same faint sound,
and they may equally begin to be pained by the same loud sound, and
yet they may differ as to the number of intermediate grades of
sensation. The grades will be less numerous as the organisation is
of a lower order, and the keenest sensation possible to it will in
consequence be less intense. An artist who is capable of
discriminating more differences of tint than another man is not
necessarily more capable of seeing clearly in twilight, or more or
less intolerant of sunshine. A musician is not necessarily able to
hear very faint sounds, nor to be more startled by loud sounds than
others are. A mechanic who works hard with heavy tools and has rough
and grimy thumbs, insensible to very slight pressures, may yet have
a singularly discriminating power of touch in respect to the
pressures that he can feel.
The discriminative faculty of idiots is curiously low; they hardly
distinguish between heat and cold, and their sense of pain is so
obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is.
In their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may
literally be accepted with a welcome surprise. During a visit to
Earlswood Asylum I saw two boys whose toe-nails had grown into the
flesh and had been excised by the surgeon. This is a horrible
torture to ordinary persons, but the idiot lads were said to have
shown no distress during the operation; it was not necessary to hold
them, and they looked rather interested at what was being done.
[1] I also saw a boy with the scar of a severe wound on his wrist;
the story being that he had first burned himself slightly by accident,
and, liking the keenness of the new sensation, he took the next
opportunity of repeating the experience, but, idiot-like, he overdid
it.
The trials I have as yet made on the sensitivity of different
persons confirms the reasonable expectation that it would on the
whole be highest among the intellectually ablest. At first, owing to
my confusing the quality of which I am speaking with that of nervous
irritability, I fancied that women of delicate nerves who are
distressed by noise, sunshine, etc., would have acute powers of
discrimination. But this I found not to be the case. In morbidly
sensitive persons both pain and sensation are induced by lower
stimuli than in the healthy, but the number of just perceptible
grades of sensation between them is not necessarily different.
I found as a rule that men have more delicate powers of
discrimination than women, and the business experience of life seems
to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I
understand are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and
the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is
of the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised
on the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the
sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest
of merchants would lead to their being [3] always employed; but as
the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be
the true one.
[Footnote 3: See "Remarks on Idiocy," by E.W. Graham, M. D.,
_Medical Journal_, January 16, 1875.]
Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table,
and though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men
think them on the whole to be far from successful makers of tea and
coffee.
Blind persons are reputed to have acquired in compensation for the
loss of their eyesight an increased acuteness in their other senses;
I was therefore curious to make some trials with my test apparatus,
which I will describe in the next chapter. I was permitted to do so
on a number of boys at a large educational blind asylum, but found
that, although they were anxious to do their best, their performances
were by no means superior to those of other boys. It so happened
that the blind lads who showed the most delicacy of touch and won
the little prizes I offered to excite emulation, barely reached the
mediocrity of the various sighted lads of the same age whom I had
previously tested. I have made not a few observations and inquiries,
and find that the guidance of the blind depends mainly on the
multitude of collateral indications to which they give much heed,
and not in their superior sensitivity to any one of them. Those who
see do not care for so many of these collateral indications, and
habitually overlook and neglect several of them. I am convinced also
that not a little of the popular belief concerning the sensitivity
of the blind is due to exaggerated claims on their part that have
not been verified. Two instances of this have fallen within my own
experience, in both of which the blind persons claimed to have the
power of judging by the echo of their voice and by certain other
feelings, the one when they were approaching objects, even though
the object was so small as a handrail, and the other to tell how far
the door of the room in which he was standing was open. I used all
the persuasion I could to induce each of these persons to allow me
to put their assertions to the test; but it was of no use. The one
made excuses, the other positively refused. They had probably the
same tendency that others would have who happened to be defective in
any faculty that their comrades possessed, to fight bravely against
their disadvantage, and at the same time to be betrayed into some
overvaunting of their capacities in other directions. They would be
a little conscious of this, and would therefore shrink from being
tested.
The power of reading by touch is not so very wonderful. A former
Lord Chancellor of England, the late Lord Hatherley, when he was
advanced in years, lost his eyesight for some time owing to a
cataract, which was not ripe to be operated on. He assured me that
he had then learned and practised reading by touch very rapidly.
This fact may perhaps also serve as additional evidence of the
sensitivity of able men.
Notwithstanding many travellers' tales, I have thus far been
unsuccessful in obtaining satisfactory evidence of any general large
superiority of the senses of savages over those of civilised men. My
own experience, so far as it goes, of Hottentots, Damaras, and some
other wild races, went to show that their sense discrimination was
not superior to those of white men, even as regards keenness of
eyesight. An offhand observer is apt to err by assigning to a single
cause what is partly due to others as well. Thus, as regards eyesight,
a savage who is accustomed to watch oxen grazing at a distance
becomes so familiar with their appearance and habits that he can
identify particular animals and draw conclusions as to what they are
doing with an accuracy that may seem to strangers to be wholly
dependent on exceptional acuteness of vision. A sailor has the
reputation of keen sight because he sees a distant coast when a
landsman cannot make it out; the fact being that the landsman
usually expects a different appearance to what he has really to look
for, such as a very minute and sharp outline instead of a large,
faint blur. In a short time a landsman becomes quite as quick as a
sailor, and in some test experiments[1] he was found on the average
to be distinctly the superior. It is not surprising that this should
be so, as sailors in vessels of moderate size have hardly ever the
practice of focussing their eyes sharply upon objects farther off
than the length of the vessel or the top of the mast, say at a
distance of fifty paces. The horizon itself as seen from the deck,
[4] and under the most favourable circumstances, is barely four
miles off, and there is no sharpness of outline in the intervening
waves. Besides this, the life of a sailor is very unhealthy, as
shown by his growing old prematurely, and his eyes must be much
tried by foul weather and salt spray.
[Footnote 4: Gould's _Military and Anthropological Statistics_, p.
530. New York, 1869.]
We inherit our language from barbarous ancestors, and it shows
traces of its origin in the imperfect ways by which grades of
difference admit of being expressed. Suppose a pedestrian is asked
whether the knapsack on his back feels heavy. He cannot find a reply
in two words that cover more varieties than (1) very heavy, (2)
rather heavy, (3) moderate, (4) rather light, (5) very light. I once
took considerable pains in the attempt to draw up verbal scales of
more than five orders of magnitude, using those expressions only
that every cultivated person would understand in the same sense; but
I did not succeed. A series that satisfied one person was not
interpreted in the same sense by another.
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 associated
with nervous irritability.
SEQUENCE OF TEST WEIGHTS.