262 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
parents and grandparents, together with a composite of the race, each in their due proportions, according to the Ancestral Law (see chapter on Heredity). The result would be very instructive, but the difficulty of obtaining the material is now overwhelming. Male and female portraits blend well together, with an epicene result.
With the help of Dr. Mahomed and the permission of the authorities of Guy's Hospital, 'I took many photographs of consumptive patients and made composites of them, which are published in the Guy's Hospital Reports, vol. xxv. They show two contrasted types, the one fine and attenuated, the other coarse and blunted. Dr. Mahomed was a very promising physician, on the eve of becoming well known, when he caught a fever of the same description, I am told, as that on which he had become an authority, and died of it in his newly purchased house.
I could not make good composites of lunatics ; their features are apt to be so irregular in different ways that it was impossible to blend them. I took a photographer with me to Hanwell, where it was arranged that the patients should sit two at a time on a bench. One of them was to be led forward and posted in front of the camera, while his place on the bench was filled by the second patient moving up into it, whose previous place was to be occupied by, a third patient. I t happened that the second of the pair who were the first to occupy the bench considered himself to be a very mighty man, I forget whom, but let us say Alexander the Great. He boiled with internal fury at not being given precedence, and when
