esearch, in inquiries into the physiognomy of disease,
and for other special purposes? I think it can be turned to most
interesting account in the production of family likenesses. The most
unartistic productions of amateur photography do quite as well for
making composites as those of the best professional workers, because
their blemishes vanish in the blended result. All that amateurs have
to do is to take negatives of the various members of their families
in precisely the same aspect (I recommend either perfect full-face
or perfect profile), and under precisely the same conditions of
light and shade, and to send them to a firm provided with proper
instrumental appliances to make composites from them. The result is
sure to be artistic in expression and flatteringly handsome, and
would be very interesting to the members of the family. Young and old,
and persons of both sexes can be combined into one ideal face. I can
well imagine a fashion setting in to have these pictures.

Professional skill might be exercised very effectively in retouching
composites. It would be easy to obliterate the ghosts of stray
features that are always present when the composite is made from
only a few portraits, and it would not be difficult to tone down any
irregularity in the features themselves, due to some obtrusive
peculiarity in one of the components. A higher order of artistic
skill might be well bestowed upon the composites that have been made
out of a large number of components. Here the irregularities
disappear, the features are perfectly regular and idealised, but the
result is dim. It is like a pencil drawing, where many attempts have
been made to obtain the desired effect; such a drawing is smudged
and ineffective; but the artist, under its guidance, draws his final
work with clear bold touches, and then he rubs out the smudge. On
precisely the same principle the faint but beautifully idealised
features of these composites are, I believe, capable of forming the
basis of a very high order of artistic work.

B.--THE RELATIVE SUPPLIES FROM TOWN AND COUNTRY FAMILIES
TO THE POPULATION OF FUTURE GENERATIONS.

[_Read before the Statistical Society in_ 1873.]

It is well known that the population of towns decays, and has to be
recruited by immigrants from the country, but I am not aware that
any statistical investigation has yet been attempted of the rate of
its decay. The more energetic members of our race, whose breed is
the