XV 
DARWINISM APPLIED TO MAN 
471 
able of anything of the kind. From some inquiries I have 
made in schools, and from my own observation, I believe that 
those who are endowed with this natural artistic talent do 
not exceed, even if they come up to, one per cent of the whole 
population. 
The variations in the amount of artistic faculty are certainly 
very great, even if we do not take the extremes. The grada¬ 
tions of power between the ordinary man or woman “ who 
does not draw,” and whose attempts at representing any 
object, animate or inanimate, would be laughable, and the 
average good artist who, with a few bold strokes, can produce 
a recognisable and even effective sketch of a landscape, a 
street, or an animal, are very numerous ; and we can hardly 
measure the difference between them at less than fifty or a 
hundred fold. 
The musical faculty is undoubtedly, in its lower forms, 
less uncommon than either of the preceding, but it still differs 
essentially from the necessary or useful faculties in that it 
is almost entirely wanting in one-half even of civilised men. 
For every person who draws, as it were instinctively, there are 
probably five or ten who sing or play without having been 
taught and from mere innate love and perception of melody 
and harmony. 1 On the other hand, there are probably about 
as many who seem absolutely deficient in musical perception, 
who take little pleasure in it, who cannot perceive discords or 
remember tunes, and who could not learn to sing or play with 
any amount of study. The gradations, too, are here quite 
as great as in mathematics or pictorial art, and the special 
faculty of the great musical composer must be reckoned many 
hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than that of 
the ordinary “ unmusical ” person above referred to. 
It appears then, that, both on account of the limited 
number of persons gifted with the mathematical, the artistic, 
or the musical faculty, as well as from the enormous variations 
in its development, these mental powers differ widely from 
those which are essential to man, and are, for the most part, 
common to him and the lower animals; and that they could 
1 I am informed, however, by a music master in a large school that only 
about one per cent have real or decided musical talent, corresponding curiously 
with the estimate of the mathematicians. 
