BODIES AND BRAINS IN EXAMINATIONS.
WE are not quite sure that we comprehend the precise object at which Mr. Francis Galton is driving in his recent papers. Apparently he begins by laying it down as doctrine that high intellectual work does not injure young men's physique, unless it be through a slight, and we may add, probably temporary, weakness of the eyesight produced by much reading under imperfect lights. Indeed, this is clearly
his conviction, for in the third chapter of his latest pamphlet on bodily efficiency, which contains the maturest and most trust- worthy results of his untiring collection of facts, he makes the following interesting and suggestive statement :—" The number of Cambridge students who were measured is 1,905, and they were divided into three classes—(1) high honour men, (2) low honour men, and (3) poll men (that is to say, those who did not compete for honours, but took an ordinary pass degree). The result was that the physical efficiency of the three classes proved to be almost exactly the same, except that there appeared to be a slight deficiency in eye- sight among the high honour men. Otherwise they were alike throughout ; alike in their average bodily efficiency, and alike in the frequency with which different degrees of bodily efficiency were distributed among them." The teaching of that statement clearly is that, as there is no difference between the bodily powers of the best students and of inferior men, there is no need for any examina- tion except in study. The students are as strong as other people ; consequently, if we pick the most successful students, say, for the different Civil Services, we pick the fittest men, those clearly being fittest who are mentally ablest, yet are not disqualified by physical debility. We should have said this was as inevitable a deduction as it was possible to draw ; but it is not Mr. Galton's at all. On the contrary, he thinks that the Cambridge facts show that success in examina- tions is no guarantee of physical qualifications—though it is, on the face of the figures, guarantee of average strength —and wants to institute a system of marks which, so far as it operates, will tell strongly in favour of comparative physique. The strongest and healthiest man will, if his marks are sufficient to prevail over the marks of the next competitor, win the contest, and be selected for the prize. Now, what is the use of that? We quite see the use of a pass examination in health for all appointments, because the State does not want to be burdened with invalids ; and in the case of military officers, the pass certificate may be a high one, because a soldier sometimes needs a great reserve of endurance ; but the use of a competition in physical force we do not see. The State servant, even if he is a military officer, is not wanted to be more than competent in physique ; and why should mental attainments be weighted in the race by marks given to need- less qualifications, which, as Mr. Galton fully admits, may not be exceptionally present in the exceptionally able man, and may therefore serve, and often would serve, to keep him out P Be it observed that Mr. Galton is not one of the shallow observers who think that brain-power and sound health are incompatible. He expressly admits, as in the passage we have quoted, that they are not ; yet he desires to obtain ex- ceptional physique so much, that he risks, to gain it, some considerable loss of mental calibre. He would give Sandow, say, a thousand marks in five thousand, at the risk of his defeating a competitor nearly one-fifth his superior in brains, and of the ordinary physique. Why ?
The answer is, we suppose, that Mr. Gallon, though he is far too accurately informed, and has seen too many students weighed and measured and punched, to believe the ordinary fallacy that cultivated men are sickly, is led away by a fallacy of another kind, that the higher the physique, the more useful will a State servant be. We question it altogether. Health of a kind, persistent health, however slight, is necessary to complete efficiency in all men ; but sufficient health to do the work being granted, we doubt if surplus health is not a posi- tive drawback. State work in the higher departments is now at least an affair of the mind, the able man being safer and more efficient, and therefore better worth State. pay, almost in the precise degree of his ability. Well, surplus health militates in most men slightly against that ability. The men who possess abounding health—health such as makes it a pleasure to live, health such as Lytton tried to describe in " Margrave," and Hawthorne did describe in his soulless hero, the faun- descended Donatello—usually disinclines a man both to hard study and to severe or continuous mental exertion. Such a man wants to be "out," not "in." He stands close to Nature, and wants to enjoy her gifts, to drink the air, to exert his muscles, to feel the joy as of conquest over an unseen opponent, in performing some exhausting feat. The blood in his veins runs too swiftly, his heart beats too strongly, his sinews crave too fiercely for exertion, to permit him to tax his brain, and as a rule, at the period of adolescence, which is the period about to be fixed for competition by the new rules, he will not do it. There are exceptions, no doubt, all- round men in whom enormous strength and iron nerves are "inked to clear brains—Alexander the Great was an absolutely perfect instance, one in which the physique of a Greek god was united to the brain of a thinker of genius—but that is the usual rule. The specially strong man tires himself in indulging his strength, and then can learn but little, a proposi- tion proved a few years ago in the Cornell University past all question. In that excessively interesting experiment, upon which such sums were expended, the object was to prove that severe bodily labour and high mental labour were absolutely compatible, and under most favourable conditions, and by men of most persistent temper, it was acknowledged to be a failure. The successful labourers could not be successful mental workers. It was not only that they were too tired, but that they lost the power of concentrating thought which, though there have been plenty of Hugh Millers, is given in youth, nine times out of ten, only to lads in whose veins the blood is not rolling too joyously. Donatello is never a reading man, and the youth with surplus health, and exercised muscles, and a heart which allows him to " cut the record " in a foot-race, loses therefore something in his mental equipment which in after-life he seldom regains. Moreover, if the work to be done is mainly sedentary, the work of a despatch or report writer here, or of a Judge or Commissioner in India, he will never be either as industrious or as thoughtful as the feebler man. Nature will be too strong for him, and tempt him out to play. Ask in any profession you will, and you will find the chiefs tell you that for solid, persistent, long-continued work, as well as thinking power, the men they like are men who are never ill, but who seem never quite well, who rather avoid over-exertion, whose pulses are never too full, and who when pressed, while they never stop, contract a look of weary lassitude. It is they, not those abounding in health, who display persistent energy, and who, when driven, can and do reveal a power of endurance, derived, we fancy, mainly from will, but in part from their reserve of untaxed vitality, which astonishes their physical superiors. We say nothing, for the Times has said enough, of the danger of driving out of the service highly able men without physical qualifications, men like the " asthmatic skeleton," William the Third, or the great Indian antiquarian and administrator who literally could not be taught to ride the smallest pony, and maintain only that, sufficient health being granted, surplus health is rather a drawback for high State service. Which would Mr. Galion take for a first-class civilian, Lord Dalhousie, or, let us say, not to be invidious, any man whatever whom he knows to be of nearly faultless physique ? Yet Lord Dalhousie was a man who probably never had a day's full joyous health in his life, who inherited fatal liabilities, and who, after only eight years' service in India, whither he . went at thirty-five, service, too, passed amidst every alleviating sanitary circumstance, including long residences in the Hills, returned home, as he himself records, a hopeless wreck. "My rest is destroyed," he writes to Dr. Grant, in a letter quoted in Sir W. Hunter's short Life of him just issued; " my appe- tite again wholly gone. I loathe the sight of food, and in spite of tonics, and careful treatment, with which I have no fault to find, I am low, languid, sick, deaf, stupid, weak, and miserable.' Lord Dalhousie was now a confirmed cripple, able only to move about upon crutches ; as deaf as the Ochterlony Monument,' he says, and as dull as the pulpit in the Old Cathedral." It is just two years to-day,' he wrote in the spring of 1858, since I laid down the office of Governor- General ; and ill as I then was, upon my word, my dear Grant, I was a better man than I feel myself at this moment." There is, too, another reason why competitive examinations in physique are of no value, and even a pass examination, for anything but soundness, of very little. Mental capacity almost invariably lasts, but health does not. The able lad of twenty, nine times out of ten, unless he is vicious or has that -unaccountable proclivity to drink, becomes an able man ; but neither strength nor health is durable in anything like the same degree. The ablest surgeons will tell you that no human being, whatever his skill in diagnosis, or his shrewdness of judgment, can give a certificate of health good for more than six months, and the Insurance Offices, which deal with picked lives, are giving up examinations as a useless precaution. The present writer has seen strong men of his acquaintance
break down by the score, while he himself, who was rejected by three Life Offices thirty-six years ago, can do as much work as ever. Indeed, as far as the Indian Civil Service is con- cerned, we should question whether Mr. Galton's skilful and laborious devices for ascertaining the comparative health and physical qualifications of candidates are of any practical use. They are, we will fully admit, admirable tests of strength and soundness, but not one of them will give the slightest clue to the great Indian difference between man and man, the liability to suffer from fever, which many experienced Indian doctors can detect by sight alone, but which none of them pretend thoroughly to explain. That liability, the most enervating of all, is the special liability of the physically strong, who, moreover, succumb far more readily than the weak to many nervous disorders, and especially to a form of incipient paralysis com- paratively little known among well-nourished men outside the tropics. We say nothing of courage, the only true physical qualification—if it be physical—which is wholly beyond measurement by the finest instruments, and only plead that physical strength can only be tested for a momentary period, and when tested, is, beyond a certain point, of little value.
But Mr. Galton will say there must be scores of positions in Asia, if not at home, where physique is almost everything, is worth more even than the brain-power on which he, as well as we, sets such store. Quite true, and if you will but leave things alone a little, natural selection will do its work, and the man of physique will drift to the work where physique is required. Tailors do not seek the occupation of loading tumbrils, and although a man in service must obey orders, neither the chooser nor the chosen give up all right of dis- crimination in choice. If, indeed, the clever lads who win in examinations were, as some stupid people fancy, always blear- eyed and narrow-chested bookworms, there would be sense in imposing a new test ; but Mr. Galton himself makes it his own first point that this is not the case. The first grade of honour- men, he reports, are exactly as strong and as healthy as the pass-men. The effect of a year's savage cramming, even for such a prize as a permanent maintenance has now become to the cultivated, soon wears off, and the number of the physically unfit who win is extraordinarily small. The first civilian elected by competition who ever went to India was no doubt unfit, and his fate for years created a prejudice against intellectual examination ; but of the three who were nearly bracketed with him, two were exceptionally powerful men, big enough to content Prince Bismarck or General Caprivi ; while the third acquired a reputation as an athlete and a man for games. There will not be too much intellect, Mr. Galton may assure himself, even in the Civil Services, and we shall have plenty of strong men, even if we do not fidget about their depth of respiration or measurement around the girth. If he doubts, let him ask any experienced recruiting officer to tell him the weight of the " puny" Londoner, with the eyes of a ferret and the brain of an attorney, when he enlists, and of the same man by the time he has won his serjeant's stripes. That would give him a new light on the value of his anthropometric devices as applied to men under twenty-five.
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