Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/784

762 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. 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. 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.

by Herr Regel with reference to the influence of external factors on the odor of plants show that the most important is the indirect influence of light on the formation of etheric oils and their evaporation. Heat and light intensify the fragrance of strongly fragrant flowers, which in darkness is lessened without quite disappearing. "When the whole plant was darkened, those buds only which were before fairly well developed yielded fragrant flowers, the others were scentless. If, however, only the flowers were darkened, all were fragrant. Other plants open their flowers and are fragrant only by night. When these plants were kept continuously in the dark, they lost their scent, as they lost their starch. When brought into light again, both starch and fragrance returned. Besides light, respiration has a decided influence on the fragrance. In general, the opening of flowers coincides with their fragrance, but there is no necessary connection between these phenomena.