40 galton.org
40
Inquiries into Human Faculty
tendencies, and to their long-practised concealment of those they do not
restrain but desire to hide. The necessary observations ought, however, to
be easily made on young children in schools, whose manifestations of
character are conspicuous, who are simultaneously for months and years
under the eye of the same master or mistress, and who are daily classed
according to their various merits. I have occasionally asked the opinion of
persons well qualified to form them, and who have had experience of
teaching, as to the most obvious divisions of character to be found among
school children. The replies have differed, but, those on which most stress
was laid were connected with energy, sociability, desire to attract notice,
truthfulness, thoroughness, and refinement.
The varieties of the emotional constitution and of likings and
antipathies are very numerous and wide. I may give two instances which I
have not seen elsewhere alluded to, merely as examples of variation. One
of them was often brought to my notice at the time when the public were
admitted to see the snakes fed at the Zoological Gardens. Rabbits, birds,
and other small animals were dropped in the different cages, which the
snakes, after more or less serpentine action, finally struck with their
poison fangs or crushed in their folds. I found it a horrible but a
fascinating scene. We lead for the most part such an easy and carpeted
existence, screened from the stern realities of life and death, that many of
us are impelled to draw aside the curtain now and then, and gaze for a
while behind it. This exhibition of the snakes at their feeding-time, which
gave to me, as it doubtless did to several others, a sense of curdling of the
blood, had no such effect on many of the visitors. I have often seen
people—nurses, for instance, and children of all ages—looking
unconcernedly and amusedly at the scene. Their indifference was perhaps
the most painful element of the whole transaction. Their sympathies were
absolutely unawakened. I quote this instance, partly because it leads to
another very curious fact that I have noticed as regards the way with
which different persons and races regard snakes.
I myself have a horror of them, and can only by great self-control, and
under a sense of real agitation, force myself to touch one. A considerable
proportion of the English race
