BOOKS.

MR..GALTON'S INQUIRIES INTO HUMAN FACULTY, AND ITS DEVELOPMENT.* THOSE who have read any of Mr. G-altou's previous writings, especially his Hereditary Genius, will not be surprised at find- ing in this work an extraordinary amount of curious investiga- tion into matters somewhat apart from the ordinary line of scientific research, pursued with indefatigable industry, great ingenuity, and no small amount of labour.

The author lays no claim to being exhaustive, but aims rather at being suggestive, while, at the same time, something like logical sequence is preserved by an arrangement and revisal of various short treatises, which have previously appeared in a more desultory shape and order in various publications. If his leading ideas are not altogether new, there is certainly much novelty in many of his facts, in his method of exact collection and veri- fication of them, in the importance with- which he successfully invests most of them, and in the way in which he has managed to bring all of them to bear upon a common purpose.

The dominant ideas of this curious volume undoubtedly are (1), the very great variety which occurs in the psychological de- velopment of different individuals of the human race ; (2), the great extent to which this is due to original construction (per- sonal and hereditary, especially the latter), rather than to education and surroundings ; (3), as the logical conclusion of all this, that it is possible and is our " religious " duty, both individually and socially, to use every lawful means to farther that evolution which is ever going on, more or less rapidly,—to be, so to speak, "workers together" with the great First Cause in that improvement which, with enormous waste of material and force and much suffering, is the slim, and gradual result of the con- stitution of things.

Such is the key-note of the whole book ; but in the course of its discussions there is an immense amount of extremely interest- ing matter, one of the most curious spvimens of which is the author's pet method of discovering the typical or generalised features of certain groups of persons by photographs of many individuals (all, of course, in the same position and of the same size), which are rapidly exposed to the camera so as to be super- imposed on each other, the traits which are individual and ex- ceptional leaving only a slight shade, while those common to the whole become intensified by the cumulative process. Wonder- fully distinct faces, from groups of members of one family, of criminals, of persons of tubercular constitution, &c., are shown on the frontispiece. He gives an anecdote of how the mother of two girls who were not specially like each other, on seeing their generalised photograph, said,—" Oh, that is A."—" No, it must be B. I never knew before that they were at all like each other !"

The inquiry into the variety of power in different persons to " visualise " their thoughts is one of the most elaborately worked- out portions, and there are very odd illustrations of a strange propensity, that of mentally investing different numbers or different letters of the alphabet with special colours, and of picturing certain series of numbers in peculiar and apparently senseless arrangements as to relative position. These vagaries seem to be much more common than is generally supposed, because the persons so constituted seldom confess their idio- syncracy, from fear of ridicule. The present writer has all his life been unable to dissociate the printed letters of the alphabet from what seems to him their appropriate colours, and he is quite unable to trace this propensity to any association formed in childhood. It is, perhaps, worthy of notice that all these. colours are tertiary, never pure, or even secondary.

Perhaps the most curious chapter is one upon "Twins." The author must have had an overwhelming amount of correspond-

ence this subject, as well as on many others which he has * login sr into Hamm Faculty and Development. By Francis Balton, F.&&

London : Hacmillan and Co. 1863.

subjected to a sort of statistical test. The result of his in- quiries is substantially this :—That in that large majority of cases of twins in which the mental and moral characteristics of two brothers or two sisters are as similar as their faces, the former is the result of original mental constitution, apart from and even in spite of great differences of education and outward circum- stances. There are also examples of twins, far separate in locality, taking the same disease at the same time, and each. feeling assured that his brother had so suffered. The following is a strong instance of similarity; it was sent to the author by the brother of the twins :— " A was coming home from India, on leave; the ship did not arrive for some days after it was due; the twin-brother B had come up from his quarters to receive A, and their old mother was very nervous. One morning, A rushed in, saying, ` Oh, mother, how are you ?' Her answer was, 'No, B, it's a bad joke ; you know how anxious I am and it was a little time before A could persuade her that he was the right man."

Of thirty-five pairs of twins, sixteen are described as closely similar in tastes and disposition. In the remaining nineteen, they were much alike, but with certain minor differences, the latter mainly depending on greater or less vigour of nerve and vital energy. In--twenty cases, the dissimilarity of the twins was very great, both in body and mind, in spite of identity of nurture.

There is a good deal both of fact and speculation tending to illustrate the now common doctrine of "unconscious cerebra- tion," a hypothesis which, though containing an idea somewhat difficult to grasp, affords the only reasonable explanation of a great variety of phenomena in dreaming, and in many more or less morbid conditions. Mr. Galton applies it to the visual and auditory hallucinations both of the insane and of the sane, these phenomena being undoubtedly much more common in the latter than is generally known. After a summary of facts, many of which are very interesting, he says :—

"The weirdness of visions lies in their sudden appearance, in their vividness while present, and in their sudden departure. An incident in the Zoological Gardens struck me as a helpful simile. I happened to walk to the seal-pond at a moment when a sheen rested on the un- broken surface of the water. After waiting a while, I became sud- denly aware of the head of a seal, black, conspicuous, and motionless, just as though it had always been there, at a spot on which my eye had rested a moment previously, and seen nothing. Again, after a while, my eye wandered, and on its returning to the spot, the seal was gone. The water had closed in silence over its head without leaving a ripple, and the sheen on the surface of the pond was as un- broken as when I first reached it. Where did the seal come from, and whither did it go ? This could easily have been answered, if the glare had not obstructed the view of the movements of the animal under water. As it was, a solitary link in a continuous chain of action stood isolated from all the rest. So it is with the vision ; a single stage in a series of mental processes emerges into the domain of consciousness. All that pre- cedes and follows lies out of it, and its character can only be in- ferred. We see in a general way that a condition of the presentation of visions lies in the over-sensitiveness of certain tracks or domains of brain-action and the under-sensitiveness of others, certain stages in a mental process being represented very vividly in consciousness, while the other stages are unfelt ; also that individualism is changed to dividualism. I do not recollect seeing it remarked that the ordinary phenomena of dreaming serve to show that partial sensitiveness in a normal condition during sleep. They do so because one of the most marked characteristics of the dreamer is the absence of common-sense. He accepts wildly incongruous visions without the slightest scepti- cism. . . . . . The brain is known to be imperfectly supplied with blood during sleep, and cannot, therefore, bo at full work. It is pro- bable enough, from hydraulic analogies, that imperfect irrigation would lead to partial irrigation, and therefore to suppression of action in some parts of the brain, and that this is really the case seems to be proved by the absence of common-sense daring dreams."

He makes use of the metaphor that there is what he calls "the antechamber of the brain," a sort of storehouse of ideas not completely within the range of consciousness, but lying close at hand, out of which the conscious mind in the " presence-cham- ber" summons those ideas of which it is in want when in active exercise, with more or less relevancy, according to its logical power, and the richness of the contents of the so-called " antechamber ":—

" The consequence of all this is that the mind frequently does good work withont the slightest exertion. In composition, it will often produce- a better effect than if it acted with effort, because the essence of good composition is that the ideas should be connected by the easiest possible transitions. When a man has been thinking hard and loog upon a @abject, he becomes temporarily familiar with certain steps of thought, certain short-cats, and certain far-fetched associations, that do not commend themselves to the minds of other persons, nor, indeed, to his own at other times ; therefore, it is better that his transitory familiarity with them should come to an end, before he begins to write or speak.'

After a pause, his ideas will have lost their adventitious relations to each other, and stand in those which will meet with ready acceptance in the minds of others. The hypothesis of one portion of the mind communicating with another portion as with a different person is one not sufficiently worked out by psychologists, either in the form of suggestions from the " antechamber " in a normal and active condition of the whole mind, or in those conditions of sleep or of hallucination in which the conscious mind is actually deceived, and mistakes the thoughts or words for those of another individu- ality. One ingenious writer, the late Dr. Wigan, in a book too little known, suggests that it depends on the fact of division of the brain into right and left hemispheres. This view is scarcely confirmed by modern physiology; but if the "partial-irrigation" theory of our author is correct, it follows that in dreams it is nearly always the same portion or track of brain which is .

deficient in sensitiveness, those portions which are connected with the sense of improbability or absurdity, whence the absence of surprise characteristic of most dreams.

These are a few specimens of the many corners of anthro- pology somewhat out of the beaten track of investigation into which Mr. Galton penetrates. If he fails in many instances to convince, the reader cannot avoid having innumerable and most novel and interesting lines of further research suggested to him.

The region of Mr. Galton's investigations naturally invests his book with a materialistic and necessitarian aspect; but he seldom states dogmatically what his opinions are, and those who are the most averse to the narrow so-called philosophy of the period, will find little in this work which is necessarily

inconsistent with their own views,—an example, among many others, of that strange rapprochement which is frequently made

between certain phases of the Calvinistic theology, and that style of thought which a good Calvinist must look upon as the

most objectionable of all. A propos of the same remark, we

cannot close without quoting our author's words on the ever- present question of the vast amount of evil and of apparent waste on our globe. Anticipating the ultimate cooling and

practical extinction of this planet, he says :— " Neither can we discover whether organisms here are capable of attaining the average development of organisms in either of the planets that are probably circling round most of the myriads of stars, whose physical constitution, wherever it has been observed spectro- scopically, does not differ mush from that of our Sun. But we perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and germs ; we Sod, out of any group of a thousand men selected at random, some who are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise incurably imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may rank among other worlds as one of these."

In a recent article, we have already adverted casually to Mr. Galton's attempt to prove by statistics that there is no "objec- tive efficacy " in prayer. Hit argument is stated in all sincerity and simplicity, but he lays himself open to at least two or three damaging observations—(1), he ignores the distinction between the genuine, earnest prayer of individuals, and the formal peti- tions for the long life of monarchs, &c., which barely deserve the name of prayers ; (2), he forgets that the former are generally private (all the more private, the more they are earnest), and therefore utterly beyond the reach of statistical investigation ; (3), he also ignores the distinction between praying for a direct reversal of the laws of the material world, which would be pray- ing for a•miracle, and asking for that communication of moral energy and mental light which may lead us to use the appro- priate means for the production of the desired result,—" Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost,"—by which no miracle, as it appears to many of us, is implied.

One of the weak points in Mr. Galton's speculations seems to us to be his endeavour to impress his readers with the feasibility of improving the breed of our fellow-men. We fear that there are motives constantly in action, and which will not only ever be so, but will be so in an increasing degree, and some of them connected with the noblest portion of our nature, diametrically opposed to the practical helping-on of evolution by the survival of the fittest. The hope must be a feeble one which is driven to seek for an example of social arrangements tending in this direction, in the abolition of celibate Fellowships in the two old Universities.