Inquiries into human faculty and its development / by Francis Galton.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Inquiries into human faculty and its development / by Francis Galton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    385/424 (page 363)
    that have been made out of a large number of components. Here the irregularities disappear, the features are perfectly regular and idealised, but the result is dim. It is like a pencil drawing, where many attempts have been made to obtain the desired effect: such a drawing is smudged and ineffective; but the artist, under its guidance, draws his final work with clear bold touches, and then he rubs out the smudge. On j)recisely the same principle the faint but beautifully idealised features of these composites are, I believe, capable of forming the basis of a very high order of artistic work. C—THE RELATIVE SUPPLIES FROM TOWN AND COUNTRY FAMILIES TO THE POPULATION OF FUTURE GENERATIONS. [Bead before the Statistical Society in 1873.] It is well known that the population of towns decays, and has to be recruited by immigrants from the country, but I am not aware that any statistical investigation has yet been attempted of the rate of its decay. The more energetic members of our race, whose breed is the most valuable to our nation, are attracted from the country to our towns. If residence in towns seriously inter- feres with the maintenance of their stock, we should expect the breed of Englishmen to steadily deteriorate, so far as that partic- ular influence is concerned. I am well aware that the only perfectly trustworthy way of conducting the inquiry is by statistics derived from numerous life-histories, but I find it very difficult to procure these data. I therefore have had recourse to an indirect method, based on a selection from the returns made at the census of 1871, which appears calculated to give a fair approximation to the truth. My object is to find the number of adult male representatives in this generation, of 1000 adult males in the previous one, of rural and urban populations respectively. The principle on which I have proceeded is this :— I find (A) the number of children of equal numbers of urban and of rural mothers. The census schedules contain returns of