224 galton.org
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Appendix
imagination in an exalted degree. But the imaginative power even of the highest artists
is far from precise, and is so apt to be biassed by special cases that may have struck their
fancies, that no two artists agree in any of their typical forms. The merit of the
photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors beyond
those incidental to all photographic productions.
I submit several composites made for me by Mr. H. Reynolds. The first set of portraits
are those of criminals convicted of murder, manslaughter, or robbery accompanied with
violence. It will be observed that the features of the composites are much better looking
than those of the components. The special villainous irregularities in the latter have
disappeared, and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed. They represent,
not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime. All composites are better
looking than their components, because the averaged portrait of many persons is free from
the irregularities that variously blemish the looks of each of them.
I selected these for my first trials because I happened to possess a large collection of
photographs of criminals, through the kindness of Sir Edmund Du Cane, the Director-
General of Prisons, for the purpose of investigating criminal types. They were peculiarly
adapted to my present purpose, being all made of about the same size, and taken in much
the same attitudes. It was while endeavouring to elicit the principal criminal types by
methods of optical superimposition of the portraits, such as I had frequently employed
with maps and meteorological traces,
[1]
that the idea of composite figures first occurred to
me.
The other set of composites are made from pairs of components. They are selected to
show the extraordinary facility of combining almost any two faces whose proportions are
in any way similar.
It will, I am sure, surprise most persons to see how well defined these composites are.
When we deal with faces of the same type, the points of similarity far outnumber those of
dissimilarity, and there is a much greater resemblance between faces generally than we
who turn our attention to individual differences are apt to appreciate. A traveller on his
first arrival among people of a race very different to his own thinks them closely alike, and
a Hindu has much difficulty in distinguishing one Englishman from another.
The fairness with which photographic composites represent
[1]
Conference at the Loan Exhibition of Scientific Instruments, 1878. Chapman and Hall.
Physical Geography Section, p. 312, On Means of Combining Various Data in Maps and Diagrams,
by Francis Galton, F.R.S.
