COMPOSITE PORTRAITS. 463 



cal forms. The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical 

 precision, being subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all pho- 

 tographic productions. 



I submit several composites made for me by Mr. H. Reynolds. The 

 first set of portraits are those of criminals convicted of murder, man- 

 slaughter, 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 com- 

 ponents, because the averaged portrait of many persons is free from 

 the irregularities that variouslv 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 Ed- 

 mund Du Cane, the Director-General of Prisons, for the purpose of in- 

 vestigating criminal types. They were peculiarly adapted to my pres- 

 ent purpose, being all made of about the same size and taken in much 

 the same attitudes. It was while endeavoring 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 al- 

 most 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 trav- 

 eler, on his first arrival among people of a race very different from his 

 own, thinks them closely alike, and a Hindoo has much difficulty in dis- 

 tinguishing one Englishman from another. 



The fairness with which photographic composites represent their 

 components is shown by six of the specimens. I wished to learn wheth- 

 er the order in which the components were photographed made any 

 material difference in the result, so I had three of the portraits arranged 

 successively in each of their six possible combinations. It will be ob- 

 served that four at least of the six composites are closely alike. I should 

 say that in each of this set the last of the three components was always 

 allowed a longer exposure than the second, and the second than the 

 first, but it is found better to allow an equal time to all of them. 



The stereoscope, as I stated last August in my address at Plymouth, 



1 " Conference at the Loan Exhibition of Scientific Instruments," 18V8. Chapman 

 & Hall. Physical Geography Section, p. 312. " On Means of combining Various Data 

 in Maps and Diagrams," by Francis Galton, F. R. S. 



