tration: ]

A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before
the mind's eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in
an exalted degree. But the imaginative power even of the highest
artists is far from precise, and is so apt to be biassed by special
cases that may have struck their fancies, that no two artists agree
in any of their typical forms. The merit of the photographic
composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors
beyond those incidental to all photographic productions.

I submit several composites made for me by Mr. H. Reynolds. The
first set of portraits are those of criminals convicted of murder,
manslaughter, or robbery accompanied with violence. It will be
observed that the features of the composites are much better looking
than those of the components. The special villainous irregularities
in the latter have disappeared, and the common humanity that
underlies them has prevailed. They represent, not the criminal, but
the man who is liable to fall into crime. All composites are better
looking than their components, because the averaged portrait of many
persons is free from the irregularities that variously blemish the
looks of each of them.

I selected these for my first trials because I happened to possess a
large collection of photographs of criminals, through the kindness
of Sir Edmund Du Cane, the Director-General of Prisons, for the
purpose of investigating criminal types. They were peculiarly
adapted to my present purpose, being all made of about the same size,
and taken in much the same attitudes. It was while endeavouring to
elicit the principal criminal types by methods of optical
superimposition of the portraits, such as I had frequently employed
with maps and meteorological traces,[23] that the idea of composite
figures first occurred to me.

[Footnote 23: _Conference at the Loan Exhibition of Scientific
Instruments_, 1878. Chapman and Hall. Physical Geography Section, p.
312, _On Means of Combining Various Data in Maps and Diagrams_, by
Francis Galton, F.R.S.]

The other set of composites are made from pairs of components. They
are selected to show the extraordinary facility of combining almost
any two faces whose proportions are in any way similar.

It will, I am sure, surprise most persons to see how well defined
these composites are. When we deal with faces of the same type, the
points of similarity far outnumber those of dissimilarity,