This face and the qualities it connotes probably gives a clue to the direction in which the stock of the English race might most easily be improved.  It is the essential notion of a race that there should be some ideal typical form from which the individuals may deviate in all directions, but about which they chiefly cluster, and towards which their descendants will continue to cluster.  The easiest direction in which a race can be improved is towards that central type, because nothing new has to be sought out.  It is only necessary to encourage as far as practicable the breed of those who conform most nearly to the central type, and to restrain as far as may be the breed of those who deviate widely from it.  Now there can hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomical type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture.

As a contrast to the composite of the Royal Engineers, I give those of two of the coarse and low types of face found among the criminal classes.  The photographs from which they were made are taken from two large groups.  One are those of men undergoing severe sentences for murder and other crimes connected with violence; the other of thieves.  They were reprints from those taken by order of the prison authorities for purposes of identification.  I was allowed to obtain copies for use in my inquiries by the kind permission of Sir Edmund Du Cane, H.M.  Director of Prisons.  The originals of these and their components have frequently been exhibited.  It is unhappily a fact that fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established, and are one of the saddest disfigurements of modern civilisation.  To this subject I shall recur.

I have made numerous composites of various groups of convicts, which are interesting negatively rather than positively.  They produce faces of a mean description, with no villainy written on them.  The individual faces are villainous enough, but they are villainous in different ways, and when they are combined, the individual peculiarities disappear, and the common humanity of a low type is all that is left.

The remaining portraits are illustrations of the application of the process to the study of the physiognomy of disease.  They were published a year ago with many others, together with several of the portraits from which they were derived, in a joint memoir by Dr. Mahomed and myself, in vol. xxv. of the Guy’s Hospital Reports.  The originals and all the components have been exhibited on several occasions.

In the lower division of the Plate will be found three composites, each made from a large number of faces, unselected, except on the ground of the disease under which they were suffering.  When only few portraits are used, there must be some moderate resemblance between them, or the result would be blurred; but here, dealing with as many as 56, 100, and 50 cases respectively, the combination of any medley group results in an ideal expression.