Photographic Researches and Portraiture 301
1903 to spend the necessary time in working out the practical details of camera dimensions, or spend the hours required in dark-room experimental work. As in the similar case of analytical photography, what is needed is a young and enthusiastic photographer.
jTo grasp fully Galton's photographic activities at this time we must bear in mind two important facts. He was still starching for some physical features which should have high association with the mental characters. This attitude was perfectly reasonable at that date, because not only no correlations between such characters had been determined, but the methods of measuring correlations were of the crudest kind. Further Galton was a traveller, and every traveller is accustomed as he passes along to notice that the racial mentality changes with the change of the physical characters. The conception therefore naturally arises that physique and mentality are highly correlated. The American Indian, the Negro, or the Arab has each his individual physique, and each also his individual mentality. But this appearance of high correlation may be most deceptive; it does not follow that there is any organic linkage between the physical and psychical characters. If a race be started from a pair of individuals both possessing a physique of type A and a mentality of type A', we may find in later generations an apparent linkage of A and A' in all the members ; but this is not a true correlation, and a cross-breeding may show that A and A' have no organic relation, and can be at once separated. In the second place Galton did, like most men of his generation and probably like most of us to-day, consciously or unconsciously, give weight to physiognomy. So impressed by physiognomy is mankind in ordinary every-day life, that we hardly realise how much confidence we place in it. We say a person is good or bad, is intelligent or stupid, is slack or energetic, on what is too often only a rapid physiognomic judgment. The custom is so universal as a rough guide to conduct, that we are almost compelled to believe that there is in human beings an intuitive or instinctive appreciation of mental character from facial expression. Galton differed only from the mass of us in desiring to ascertain on what physiognomic appreciation is based. He belonged to a generation in which the influence of Lavater and the belief in some form of phrenology were still appreciable. He accordingly sought to isolate types and to measure deviations from facial type, in order to determine whether facial variations were correlated with mental variations. He was really attempting to make a true science out of the study of physiognomy. The anthropologist up to Galton's date had employed portraiture to distinguish racial types physically. Galton employed portraiture to distinguish if possible between mental types. He may have been pursuing a will-o'-thewisp, but this psychical investigation was really at the basis of all his photographic work, and he was interested in my desire for a photographic 'bi-proector,' not in the first place because it would relieve the difficulties of an editor, but chiefly because it would be of great service in composite and analytical photography, It may be that it is rather on the play of features than on their static form that our intuitive judgment as to mental and moral
