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 larg