friends, to hear a strong expression of opinion that the
predominance of one face was evident, and then on asking which face
it was, to discover that they disagreed. I have even known a
composite in which one portrait seemed unduly to prevail, to be
remade without the component in question, and the result to be much
the same as before, showing that the reason of the resemblance was
that the rejected portrait had a close approximation to the ideal
average picture of the rest.

These small composites give a better notion of the utmost capacity
of the process than the larger ones, from which they are reduced.
In the latter, the ghosts of individual peculiarities are more
visible, and usually the equal traces left by every member of a
moderately-sized group can be made out by careful inspection; but it
is hardly possible to do this in the pictures in the Plate, except
in a good light and in a very few of the cases. On the other hand,
the larger pictures do not contain more detail of value than the
smaller ones.


DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPOSITES.

The medallion of Alexander the Great was made by combining the
images of six different medals, with a view of obtaining the type of
features that the makers of those medals concurred in desiring to
ascribe to him. The originals were kindly selected for me by Mr. R.
Stuart Poole from the collection in the British Museum. This
composite was one of the first I ever made, and is printed together
with its six components in the _Journal of the Royal Institution_,
in illustration of a lecture I gave there in April 1879. It seems to