the drawings used in the art schools for the same purpose appear antiquated. Since then the English anthropologist, Mr. Francis Galton, has solved by photography a problem which was as much beyond the reach of the artist as the representation of the average expression of a person was of the photographer—namely, of collecting into a typical picture the average physiognomy and shape of the head of a considerable number of persons of the same age, race, like degree of mental development, or similar pathological condition or criminal propensity. This is done by causing faint pictures of faces of the same category to cover one another on the same negative.[1] Prof. Bowditch, of the Harvard Medical School, has in this way taken average (composite) pictures or the types of American students and girl students, drivers and conductors of horse-cars. In the last cases the superiority of the intellectual expression of the conductor type over that of the driver type is very plain. It would have been something for Lavater and Gall.
Again, pathology comes into the service of fine art. Dr. Charcot has recognized, in the photographically fixed convulsive attitudes and distortions of hysterics, the classical representations of possessed persons.[2] It is indeed most wonderful to see how Raphael, otherwise dwelling only in the ideal, portrayed in his Transfiguration the figure of the possessed boy so realistically that one can with certainty, from the Magendian position of his eyes, diagnosticate a central disease. It is in harmony with this, as was recently remarked in New York, that his left hand is afflicted with an athetoid cramp.[3]
[To be concluded.]
