TRANSACTIONS OP THE SECTIONS. 95 



stances arising -which made it highly probable that I should bo prevented from 

 attending this meeting, I was compelled to ask to be superseded. New arrange- 

 ments were then made by the Council, and I thought no more about the matter. 

 I lowever, at the last moment, the accomplished ethnologist who otherwise would 

 have presided over you was himself debarred by illness from attending, and the 

 original plan had to be reverted to. 



Under these circumstances I thought it best to depart somewhat from the usual 

 form of Addresses, and to confine myself to certain topics with which I happen to 

 have been recently engaged, even at the risk of incurring the charge of submitting 

 to you a memoir rather than an address. 



I propose to speak of the study of those groups of men who are sufficiently 

 similar in their mental characters or in their physiognomy, or in both, to admit of 

 classification ; and I especially desire to show that many methods exist of pursuing 

 the inquiry in a strictly scientific manner, although it has hitherto been too often 

 conducted with extreme laxity. 



The types of character of which I speak are such as those described by Theo- 

 phrastus, La Bruyere, and others, or such as may be read of in ordinary literature 

 and are universally recognized as being exceedingly true to nature. There are no 

 worthier professors of this branch of Anthropology than the writers of the higher 

 works of fiction, who are ever on the watch to discriminate varieties of character, 

 and who have the art of describing them. It would, I think, be a valuable service 

 to Anthropology if some person well versed in literature were to compile a volume 

 of extracts from novels and plays that should illustrate the prevalent types of human 

 character and temperament. What, however, I especially wish to point out is, that 

 it ha3 of late years become possible to pursue an inquiry into certain fundamental 

 qualities of the mind by the aid of exact measurements. Most of you are aware of 

 the recent progress of what has been termed Psycho-physics, or the science of sub- 

 jecting mental processes to physical measurements and to physical laws. I do not 

 now propose to speak of the laws that have been deduced, such as that which is 

 known by the name of Fechner, and its numerous offshoots, including the law of 

 fatigue ; but I will briefly allude to a few instances of measurement of mental pro- 

 cesses, merely to recall them to your memory. They will show, what I desire to lay 

 stress upon, that the very foundations of the differences between the mental qualities 

 of man and man admit of being gauged by a scale of inches and a clock. 



Take, for example, the rate at which a sensation or a volition travels along the 

 nerves, which has been the subject of numerous beautiful experiments. We now 

 loiow that it is far from instantaneous, having, indeed, no higher velocity than that 

 of a railway express train. This slowness of pace, speaking relatively to the require- 

 ments that the nerves have to fulfil, is quite sufficient to account for the fact that 

 very small animals are quicker than very large ones in evading rapid blows, and 

 for the other fact that the eye and the ear are situated in almost all animals in the 

 head, in order that as little time as possible should be lost on the road in trans- 

 mitting their impressions to the brain. Now the velocity of the complete process 

 of to and fro nerve-transmission in persons of different temperaments has not been 

 yet ascertained with the desired precision. Such difference, as there may be, is 

 obviously a fundamental characteristic, and one that well deserves careful examina- 

 tion. I may take this opportunity of suggesting a simple inquiry that would throw 

 much light on the degree in which its velocity varies in different persons, and how 

 far it is correlated with temperament and external physical characteristics. Before 

 I describe the inquiry I suggest, and towards which I have already collected a few 

 data, it is necessary that I should explain the meaning of a term in common use 

 among astronomers, namely "personal equation." It is a well-known fact that 

 different observers make different estimates of the exact moment of the occurrence 

 of any event. There is a common astronomical observation, in which the moment 

 has to be recorded at which a star that is travelling across the field of view of a 

 fixed telescope crosses the fine vertical wire by which that field of view is inter- 

 sected. In making this observation it is found that some observers are over-san- 

 guine and anticipate the event, while others are sluggish and allow the event to 

 pass by before they succeed in noting it. Tins is by no means the effect of inex- 

 perience or maladroitness, but it is a persistent characteristic of each individual, 



