File:SB-03-032-source-1.png

Summary

Description

Grades of Intelligence, a historical physiognomic illustration matching H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 3, page 32, item 1. All five overlapping profiles, individual hair strands, dark ear, brow/eyelid hatching, nose/lip contours, dashed axes and chins correspond. This is one composite diagram, not five separate portrait objects. The book's full caption includes Fig. 142; the album cutting omits that figure number.

The title and ranking belong to the nineteenth-century physiognomic publication. They are not presented as modern scientific findings about intelligence or as conclusions about the people represented.

Source

Samuel R. Wells, New Physiognomy; or, Signs of Character, as Manifested through Temperament and External Forms, and Especially in “The Human Face Divine”. New York: Fowler and Wells, Publishers, No. 389 Broadway, 1867, printed p. 126, Fig. 142.

The physical title page prints 1867. Aggregate metadata and the copyright notice give 1866; the copyright year does not replace the edition's printed title-page date. The author of the book is not automatically the artist or engraver of this figure. General acknowledgements elsewhere to F. A. Chapman and Wm. Howland do not establish authorship of this specific matrix.

• Wellcome Library copy, Internet Archive.
• Exact complete p. 126.
• Title page; copyright page.

This is a verified 1867 book witness, not an established first publication, immediate physical carrier of the cutting, or album-mounting date. The service image n133 visibly bears p. 126; the earlier misleading leaf134 intermediate is not used.

Thank you to Wellcome Library, the Medical Heritage Library and Internet Archive for freely providing the book, colour scans and catalogue.

File and processing

Lossless RGB PNG, 1220 × 770 pixels, exact crop (300, 480)–(1520, 1250) from the original 1765 × 2700 p. 126 JPEG; right/bottom exclusive. Complete profiles, dashed lines and full Fig. 142 caption remain, with small paper margins. The printed caption is already substantially horizontal; no extra rotation was necessary. No resampling, enlargement, tonal adjustment, colourization, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction. Yellow paper, age marks and show-through are retained. Exact final decoded pixels independently reproduce the source rectangle. Original JPEG retained unchanged, SHA-256 1a31f599c423845a73987ed42154fd146c4af380e17d48d573e413ca57c399c9. No claim of calibrated physical colour is made.

Rights

The current exact Internet Archive metadata for b28105886 names Wellcome Library as contributor and supplies Public Domain Mark 1.0, verified 4 November 2026. This is Public Domain Mark, not CC0. Changes: cropping only.