•240 Life nnti lAttcnt of Francis GaUon 



Gallon concludes from Dr Mann's account that a drawing by this method 

 would \te imjHXssible if the artist had not a clear imatj;e' of the animal in his 

 mind's eye. He refers also to the enmavinj^ of mammoth, elk and reindeer 

 on bone by the men of the ice-age as illustrating the same visualising faculty. 

 His argument would have been nujch strengthened h;ul the cave-drawings 

 of pjdaeolithic man been known in 1880, for these must have Ix^en made in 

 semi-obscurity without the presence of the model Ijeing jjossible. 



Among other illustrations of the visual imagery of the uncivilised races 

 Galton cites the Eskimo |)erformaiices, in particular, a chart drawn from 

 memory of the coast from Pond's Bay to tort Churchhill', a straight line 

 distance of more than 1 100 miles, which the draughtsman must at one time 

 or another have visited in his canoe, and which was in reinarkal)le accord- 

 ance with the Admiralty Chart of 1870 (p. 316). 



Galton next turns to nvunl)er forms ^nd colour sussociations, that is colours 

 associated with numl)ers, letters or more particularly vowels. He had formed 

 a collection of hundreds of such cases, not only from English, but from 

 American, French, German, Italian, Austrian and Russian correspondents. 

 He points out how in many cases the visualising faculty is not under con- 

 trol, the fii-st acquired image of any scene holds its place, and cannot be 

 subsequently corrected. M.any j)er.sons find no difficulty in recalling faces 

 unint<?re8ting to them but are powerless to summon up the looks of dear 

 relatives lost to them (i). 319). (Jalton gives an amusing experiment he made 

 with a young lady and a philosophising friend. Both lie accosted with the 

 words: "I want to tell yoti about a l)oat." The young lady immediately 

 visuali.sed a rather large boat pushing of!" from the shore, filled with gentle- 

 men and with hwlies dressed in blue and white. The philosopher said that 

 the won! 'Iwat' called up no dt;finite visual image, for he at once exerted 

 himself to hold his mind in suspense, refusing to think of any particular 

 boat, with any particular freight from any particular point of view. Galton 

 suggests that: 



"A habit of suppressing mental imagery must therefoi-e characterise men who deal much 

 with abstract idi-a.s; anil as the power of dealing easily and tiniilj' with those ideas is the surest 

 criterion of a high order of intellect, we should expect that the visualising faculty would Iks 

 starved by disuse among philosophers, and this is precisely what I have found on inquiry to be 

 the case." (p. 319.) 



Galton points out that while our readings with mental visualisation may 

 be dangerous it is equally inadvisable to starve this i)ower. He suggests 

 that if the boat-experience h.-ul been carried a stage further, the speaker 

 sjiying: "the boat was a four-oared racing boat, it was psussing quickly just 

 in front of me, and the men were bending forward to take a fresh stroke," 

 the listener ought to have had a definite picture well liefore his or her eyes. 

 It ought to have the di.stinctness of a real four-oar going either to the right 



' Later in the paper (p. 322) Galton refers to the rare power of throwing a mental image 

 on to a sheet of white jmpor and holding it fast there while it is outlined with a pencil. He 

 considers the Hush-boy ha<l souH'tliing of this faculty. 



' Lat. 7.3° to lat. ."iH" 44'. The chart was published on p. 224 of Captain IlnlVs JoumaU 

 issued by the U.S. {■i>vcrniii<-iit in 187!). 



