Ghostly Spirits - continued...

Sir Francis Galton's way of visualizing the vivid and the dead in one image

"It was while endeavoring to elicit principal criminal types by methods of optical superimposition of the portraits, such as I had frequently employed with maps and meteorological traces, that the idea of composite figures first occurred to me" (quoted in Pearson, vol. II, p. 284.) Galton's hypothesis was that the outer appearance of a human corresponded to his mental abilities. His first article on composite pictures was published in 1878 when he gave a talk on them before the Anthropological Institute. Later, in 1883, various papers on composites and other topics were put together in Galton's next important publication, Inquiries into human faculty and its development.

Heredity and its effects were constant topics in Galton's writings from 1865, when he wrote his first article on the subject, onward. Galton had read his cousin's book On the Origin of Species with great interest and fascination, and Galton's most famous book Hereditary Genius, from 1869, can be described as his reaction to Charles Darwin's ideas. Heredity in its different forms led Galton to the study of "eugenics," a word he coined in 1883 to describe the distribution of positive characteristics. Galton not only developed theories, but he also wanted to find ways to realize his own Utopia. To put it plainly, he envisioned a world in which geniuses could be bred, and the middle class exists, but criminals and other deviant people are abolished.

It was in this context that Galton invented composite portraiture; not only was it supposed to allow the pictorialization of an homme moyen or type (Quetelet) of criminal and other deviant, but it could also be used to produce composites of races or a family in order to reconstruct each clan visually and thereby also envision its future.