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 Avho 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.^ On the other hand, there are probably about 

 as many who seem absolutely deficient in musical perception, 

 who take little jDleasure 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 



^ 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. 



