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+Project Gutenberg's The Origin of Finger-Printing, by William J. Herschel
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Origin of Finger-Printing
+
+Author: William J. Herschel
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2011 [EBook #34859]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Hutton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE ORIGIN OF
+                            FINGER-PRINTING
+
+                                  BY
+
+                    SIR WILLIAM J. HERSCHEL, BART.
+
+
+                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                     LONDON   EDINBURGH   GLASGOW
+                NEW YORK   TORONTO   MELBOURNE   BOMBAY
+                                 1916
+
+
+
+                          PRINTED IN ENGLAND
+                    AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+    _TO SIR EDWARD HENRY, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I._
+
+    _Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police._
+
+
+    _I am offering you this old story of the beginnings of
+    Finger-printing, by way of expressing my warm and continuous
+    admiration of those masterly developments of its original
+    applications, whereby, first in Bengal and the Transvaal, and
+    then in England, you have fashioned a weapon of penetrating
+    certainty for the sterner needs of Justice._
+
+                                               _W. J. HERSCHEL._
+      _June, 1916._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The following pages have two objects: first, to place on record the
+genesis of the Finger-print method of personal identification, from its
+discovery in Bengal in 1858, till its public demonstration there in
+1877-8; secondly, to examine the scanty suggestions of evidence that
+this use of our fingers had been foreshadowed in Europe more than a
+hundred years ago, and had indeed been general in ancient times,
+especially in China.
+
+In later years, and in energetic hands, the method has been developed
+into a system far more effective than anything I contemplated, and I do
+not go into that part of the story; but I believe these pages will
+suffice to show the originality of my study of its two essential
+features, the strict individuality and the stubborn persistence of the
+patterns on our fingers.
+
+The gift granted to me of lighting upon a discovery which promised
+escape from one great difficulty of administration in India is more than
+ever appreciated by me since I have lived to see the promise wonderfully
+fulfilled there, and in other lands as well.
+
+For the sake of interest I give, among the illustrations, several
+examples of late 'repeats' taken many years after I left India; but
+these do not belong to my story.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+  Bengalee contract with Rājyadhar Kōnāi, 1858.
+    (_Collotype_)                              _Between pages_ 8 _and_ 9
+
+  Finger-print of Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, Medical Officer at Arrah
+    Station, June 1859                                                10
+
+  Finger-print of Captain H. Raban, Chief of the Police in Lower
+    Bengal, July 29,1860                                              12
+
+  Finger-print of the Mahārājā of Nuddea, April 13, 1862              13
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Charles Howard, Superintendent of Police,
+    Nuddea, April 13, 1862; and repeat, 1908                          13
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Alfred C. Lyall, 1877; and repeat, 1908         17
+
+  Finger-print of Captain A. Coleman, P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia',
+    February 1877                                                     17
+
+  Finger-prints of Bechā Rām Dās Adhikāri,
+    (_a_) made in 1877, (_b_) made in 1892                            21
+
+  Finger-print of W. F. Courthope, 1877; and repeat, 1913             27
+
+  Finger-print of Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., 1877, aet.
+    2¾ years; and repeat, 1913. (_Collotype_)                _Facing_ 27
+
+  Finger-print of Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., September 22, 1877       28
+
+  Finger-print of Dr. J. F. Duthie, September 22, 1877                28
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Theodore Hope, Bo.C.S., 1877                    29
+
+  Finger-prints of William Waterfield, B.C.S., (_a_) July 31, 1860,
+    (_b_) March 31, 1877                                              29
+
+  Finger-prints of W. J. Herschel, (_a_) June 1859, (_b_) July 1859,
+    (_c_) March 31, 1877, (_d_) February 22, 1916                     30
+
+  Finger-prints, enlarged, of A. E. H. Herschel: 1881, aet. 7¾;
+    1890, aet. 17; 1913, aet. 40                                      31
+
+  'Thomas Bewick his mark'                                            33
+
+  A 'tep-sai' of Bengal compared with a finger-print                  35
+
+  Caste-marks of illiterates, 1865                                    36
+
+  Finger-mark on a Chinese Bank-note. (_Collotype_)          _Facing_ 38
+
+
+
+
+THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING
+
+
+In 1858, after five years' service, as an Assistant under the old East
+India Company, in the interior of Bengal, I was in charge of my first
+subdivision, the head-quarters of which were then at Jungipoor, on the
+upper reaches of the Hooghly river. My executive and magisterial
+experience had by that time forced on me that distrust of all evidence
+tendered in Court which did so much to cloud our faith in the people
+around us. We cannot be too thankful that things have greatly improved
+in India in the last sixty years, but the time of which I am speaking
+was the very worst time of my life in this respect. I remember only too
+well writing in great despondency to one of the best and soberest-minded
+of my senior companions at Haileybury[1] about my despair of any good
+coming from orders and decisions based on such slippery facts, and the
+comfort I found in his sensible reply.
+
+  [1] Till 1857 the East India Company's College.
+
+It happened, in July of that year, that I was starting the first bit of
+road metalling at Jungipoor, and invited tenders for a supply of
+'ghooting' (a good binding material for light roads). A native named
+Rājyadhar Kōnāi, of the village of Nistā, came to terms with me, and at
+my desire drew up our agreement in his own hand, in true commercial
+style. He was about to sign it in the usual way, at the upper right-hand
+corner, when I stopped him in order to read it myself; and it then
+occurred to me to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his hand, by
+way of signature instead of writing. There was nothing very original
+about that, as an idea. Many must have heard of some such use of a man's
+hand; and the correspondence that has taken place has brought to light
+old instances of the hand, or the nail of a finger, or the teeth in
+one's mouth, being used to certify a man's act, or a woman's. But these
+have all been isolated instances. Sir Francis Galton, however, has
+pointed out[2] that in our own times the engraver Bewick had a fancy for
+engraving his thumb-mark, with his name attached, as vignettes, or as
+colophons, in books which he published.[3] As a boy I had loved Bewick
+on Birds: I regret that it is not now to be found in our library.
+Galton's remark has reminded me that I used to see the thumb-mark there,
+as well as I recollect, in an ornamental title-page. I mention this
+because I dare say it had something to do with my fascination over
+Kōnāi's hand-markings. If so, the influence was unknown to me. The
+absorbing interests of manhood had blotted out, not Bewick, but his
+thumb-mark, from my memory. However that may be, I was only wishing to
+frighten Kōnāi out of all thought of repudiating his signature
+hereafter. He, of course, had never dreamt of such an attestation, but
+fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm and fingers over with the
+home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole
+hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a
+good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on
+another impression. Here is a facsimile of the whole document, made by
+the Clarendon Press. I was so pleased with the experiment that, having
+to make a second contract with Kōnāi, I made him attest it in the same
+way. One of these contracts I gave to Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton for
+his celebrated paper read before the Royal Society, November 1890, to
+which body he presented it; the other lies before me now. Trials with my
+own fingers soon showed the advantage of using them instead of the whole
+hand for the purpose then in view, i.e. for securing a signature which
+the writer would obviously hesitate to disown. That he might be
+infallibly convicted of perjury, if he did, is a very different matter.
+That was not settled, and could not have been settled, to the
+satisfaction of Courts of Justice, till, after many years, abundant
+agreement had been reached among ordinary people. The very possibility
+of such a 'sanction' (to use a technical expression) to the use of a
+finger-print did not dawn upon me till after long experience, and even
+then it became no more than a personal conviction for many years more.
+The decisiveness of a finger-print is now one of the most powerful aids
+to Justice. Our possession of it derives from the impression of Kōnāi's
+hand in 1858.
+
+  [2] 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892), p. 26.
+
+  [3] See Appendix.
+
+Of trials with my own fingers the oldest impression I possess was taken
+in June 1859, when I first began to keep records. I had been transferred
+to be Magistrate of Arrah, the most north-westerly district of Bengal,
+where the Mutiny still left work to do which allowed little time for
+private hobbies; but I took so many prints among the society of the
+Station, as well as among Indians of all classes, that my 'fad' about
+them was well known. The Medical Officer of Arrah was Dr. R. F.
+Hutchinson, who naturally took great interest in the subject. Twenty-one
+years later, in 1880, he was still there, and sent me a 'repeat' print
+of his fingers. Here is a facsimile of his first Arrah impression. In
+1890, being in England, he visited Galton's Laboratory, and gave a
+second repeat (after thirty-one years) which was used in 'Finger-prints'
+(1892), p. 93, to support Mr. Galton's evidence of 'Persistency'. In the
+facsimile 'Collection 1858-1913', which I am attaching to some of the
+copies of this narrative, will be found other prints which I took at
+Arrah of my whole hand and of my right foot. They agree irresistibly
+with prints taken now after an interval of fifty-seven years.
+
+    [Illustration: KONAI'S HAND Bengal 1858]
+
+    [Illustration: Contract for 2,000 maunds of road-metalling,
+    between W. J. Herschel and Rajyadhar Konai, in Konai's
+    handwriting]
+
+In 1860 I was sent as Magistrate to Nuddea, nearer to Calcutta. The
+Indigo disturbances in the district had given rise to a great deal of
+violence, litigation, and fraud; forgery and perjury were rampant. The
+rent-rolls of the ryots put into Court by the Zemindars; the pottahs
+(agreements for rent) purporting to be issued by them to each ryot, put
+in by the latter; the kabooliyats (acceptances) purporting to be signed
+by the ryot, and tendered in evidence against him; all these documents
+were frequently worth no more than the paper on which they were written.
+In my own jail a notorious convict was found making clay seals of
+well-known landlords, and forging their signatures on pottahs smuggled
+into his hands. He was detected by the colour of the floor of his cell,
+where he kept his stock-in-trade buried. Things were so bad in this and
+other ways that the administration of Civil Justice had unusual
+difficulty in preserving its dignity. I was driven to take up
+finger-prints now with a definite object before me, and for three years
+continued taking a very large number from all sorts and conditions of
+men. I give here some selected impressions of friends taken in Nuddea
+during the years 1860, 1861, and 1862, in order of date, and names of
+some others.
+
+    [Illustration: R. F. Hutchinson, June 1859, Medical Officer at
+    Arrah Station.]
+
+1860, July. Claude Brown, a prominent merchant of Calcutta, who was
+making a tour in the Indigo districts, and was at the time my guest.
+
+1860, July 29. Captain H. Raban, Head of the Bengal Police, sent to
+Nuddea on account of its disturbed state; also my guest. He took extreme
+interest in the evidence of his own imprint. It was my habit, of course,
+to give duplicates of his 'mark' to every one of importance.
+
+    [Illustration: Captain H. Raban, Head of the Police in Lower
+    Bengal, July 29, 1860.]
+
+1860, July 31. W. Waterfield, B.C.S., a college friend, afterwards
+Comptroller-General of the Treasuries of India. I have several 'repeats'
+of his; see especially p. 29.
+
+1861, June 24. Ogilvie Temple, Judge of the Court of Small Causes,
+Kooshtea.
+
+1862, April 13. At a gathering at my house at Kishnagar I had the good
+fortune to secure the prints of many other notables of the district.
+
+The Mahārājā of Nuddea. He was the highest of the old nobility of
+Bengal. He was much struck, as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of the
+'pattern' on one of his fingers at the core.
+
+    [Illustration:
+    April 13, 1862. Mahārājā of Nuddea.
+    Enlarged for the remarkable pattern]
+
+    [Illustration:
+    April 13, 1862. A. C. Howard.
+    July 20, 1908. Sir Charles Howard.]
+
+Same day. E. Grey, B.C.S. A college friend, on my staff, afterwards
+Civil and Sessions Judge. He, I am happy to say, is still alive (1916),
+and his 'repeat' is quite good now.
+
+Same day. A. C. Howard, District Superintendent of Police, Nuddea,
+afterwards Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and knighted for his
+services there, as Sir Charles Howard. He gladly gave me a 'repeat' in
+London after forty-six years. It will be seen how good the persistence
+has been.
+
+Same day. Three other Assistant Magistrates on the unusually large staff
+of the district. Among these was F. K. Hewitt, B.C.S., afterwards
+Commissioner of Chota Nagpur. Twenty-six years later, at my request, he
+furnished Sir Francis Galton with the 'repeat' printed on p. 93 of his
+famous work 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892). I have much later repeats
+taken at Oxford.
+
+Same day. Ninian H. Thomson, Judge of the Court of Small Causes. He
+kindly sent me a repeat twenty-eight years later from Florence, and this
+also appears in the same work, p. 93.
+
+Very early in my experiments I entertained misgivings about the
+possibility of the impressions being forged by the professional
+criminals whom we had so much reason to fear. I therefore submitted some
+specimens to the best artists in Calcutta to imitate. Their failure
+sufficed to dispel all anxiety on that point. None of them come near
+Bewick's engravings in accuracy.
+
+Before I left Kishnagar (Nuddea) the violence of the Indigo disturbances
+had been subdued, but the Courts became choked with suits for
+enhancement of rent upon the recalcitrant cultivators, and the sore
+point about the genuineness of leases, &c., became aggravated. I took
+courage from despair, and in my judicial capacity (if I remember right)
+addressed an official letter to the Government of Bengal, definitely
+advocating administrative action to enforce the use of 'finger-prints'
+by both parties as necessary to the validity of these documents.
+Unfortunately I kept no private draft of this letter, and have lost the
+date, probably 1862 or 1863. It must, however, be on record, both in
+Nuddea and in the Calcutta Secretariat. Nothing came of it, and I took
+no more pains about it. But a few years ago I was pleasantly reminded by
+Mr. Horace Cockerell, for some time Secretary to the Government, who
+gave me the history of its reception, viz. that it had been deemed
+inadvisable, when things were quieting down, to raise a new controversy
+of the sort. He added that it was a matter of regret now, that no action
+whatever had been taken, but he pointed out that legislation would have
+been necessary to make the new marks admissible in evidence, and to get
+such a law on the spur of the moment would have been hopeless. That
+difficulty had certainly never occurred to me when I made the
+suggestion. But how weighty an objection it was is shown by the fact
+that it was long, even after the value of finger-prints had been
+established in practice, before the High Court of Calcutta, in a leading
+case, declared that the evidence could not be excluded, nay more, that
+it was cogent. This was many years before such a case in England. At the
+time I wrote it is quite certain that no Court in India, no pleader, no
+solicitor had ever recognized such signatures as these.
+
+In 1863 I took my first furlough to England, which changed the current
+of my thoughts. But I found that my own people had been more interested
+than I had supposed by my correspondence on the subject. Among my
+brother Alexander's papers was found after his death a letter telling
+him my ideas, and asking him to devise a roller of some sort, for
+oil-ink, better than my soft office pads.
+
+During that and later furloughs I took no public steps about the
+subject. In society, of course, it was looked on simply as a hobby,
+attracting no more serious attention than did Bewick's fancy for
+engraving his thumb-mark in his day. But the warm interest shown by my
+own people, who had known my early troubles in India, determined me,
+during my last furlough, that before completing my service I would give
+the thing an open official trial on my own responsibility. I sailed,
+1877, in the P. and O. steamer 'Mongolia', Captain Coleman, with my
+sister, now Mrs. Maclear, who was an enthusiast on my side. We roused
+attention enough on board in the Indian Ocean to obtain the
+finger-prints of the Captain and many of his officers, stewards, and
+kalāshis; also of many of the passengers, among whom I may especially
+mention Sir Alfred and Lady Lyall (as they afterwards became), Colonel
+Garrow Waterfield, and Colonel Chermside. Some thirty years later, 1908,
+Sir A. Lyall permitted me to take and use his repeat impression. Here
+are facsimiles of both, and also of Captain Coleman's, the pattern of
+which was thought then to deserve enlargement. Friendship, which for
+family reasons sprang up between Colonel Garrow Waterfield and myself,
+led him to take special interest in my project, and I cannot doubt that
+he carried that with him to the Punjab, where his reputation was high.
+Most of the other saloon passengers were business men on their way back
+to the Far East, and left us at Ceylon. If any one of them had heard of
+the use of these marks, say in China, I could not but have been told of
+it. But there was not a breath of the sort. I give here a list of the
+remaining signatures still in my possession, in case any may meet with
+recognition: F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A. Owen, J.
+Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O. Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch,
+Mrs. Philip. It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such a
+novel and evidently useful idea would have spread by their means
+wherever they went. My exhibition was frequently asked for, and I always
+gave a duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes added one of
+my own to show the extraordinary persistence of patterns after nigh
+twenty years.
+
+    [Illustration:
+    Sir A. C. Lyall. 1877.
+    Sir Alfred C. Lyall, May 15, 1908.]
+
+    [Illustration:
+    Capt. A. Coleman (P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia'), February, 1877.
+    Enlargements by eye.]
+
+On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at
+Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal
+courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration
+of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government
+pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires,
+but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile
+the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a
+little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for
+their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near
+Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such
+difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it
+well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful,
+therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the
+impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink
+made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which
+were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments.
+
+The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made
+the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it
+unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'.
+No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates
+for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated
+by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the
+genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures,
+whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women
+mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink
+from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and
+under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the
+sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the
+executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his
+intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was
+never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent
+attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied;
+personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to
+swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at
+Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered
+there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual
+executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years
+afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print
+before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence
+on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers,
+hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that
+he was _not_ the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High
+Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and confirmed the facts
+of the registration, with the necessary consequence to the offender for
+his perjury. I do not know of any other repudiation having been pressed
+to this bitter end in India or elsewhere. The contrast between the
+inherent weakness of the old law and the efficiency of the new test
+could not be better exemplified. This case gave the first stern blow to
+the foul mischief that had developed such cruel proportions in India
+under cover of our conservative legal habits.
+
+The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly in 1877 was
+thus:--After the legal formalities of registration had been observed,
+the Registrar made the person print his two fingers on the deed, and
+again in a diary book which was kept by him in the office, for my own
+inspection rather than as evidence. It is, no doubt, preserved at
+Hooghly still.
+
+It was from this book that cuttings were made at my request in 1892 by
+Mr. Duke, the magistrate, which formed the subject of Sir Francis
+Galton's volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which, for its
+cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must refer my readers. I annex a
+tracing of one of his enlargements, by permission of the London
+University, to which he left his great collection.
+
+    [Illustration: Bechā Rām Dās Adhikāri. From tracings
+    by Mr. Galton of enlargements,
+      (_a_) Made in 1877 when registering his deed;
+      (_b_) made in 1892 for Mr. Galton.]
+
+Another form in which I made use of the new system for public purposes
+was in the jail. The common device of hiring a substitute to serve out a
+term was not unknown, but it involved a long risk of detection. A safer
+but very costly, and therefore rare, device was sham death and a
+purchased corpse, affording comparative safety after escape. A case of
+this kind, carried out with the aid of an irregularly appointed doctor,
+was strongly suspected by me at Hooghly.[4] The precaution I adopted
+was to take the finger-prints of each offender when passing sentence of
+imprisonment, both on the records of the Court and also on the warrant
+to the jailer.
+
+  [4] I had him dismissed soon after for a different offence.
+
+All these processes were in full use when I left India, on the
+completion of twenty-five years' service, in 1878. I was by that time
+almost broken down in health, and more so in energy. Sir Ashley Eden,
+the Lieutenant-Governor, offered me a substantive Commissionership. I
+had already held such an appointment twice, and nothing but an honest
+sense of inability made me decline it now. I mention this in explanation
+of the slackness on my part, but for which the finger-print system would
+certainly have been put in force in the Registration Department, at
+least throughout Bengal, forty years ago. As it was, I only tried to
+induce the Inspector of Jails and the Registrar-General of the day to
+give the system a trial. Fortunately I kept an office copy of this
+letter, which, in reply to outside criticism, I published in 'Nature',
+Nov. 22, 1894, and repeat here to complete this narrative.
+
+
+(TRUE COPY OF OFFICE COPY.)
+
+                                     HOOGHLY, _August 15, 1877_.
+
+    MY DEAR B----, --I enclose a paper which looks unusual,
+    but which I hope has some value. It exhibits a method of
+    identification of persons, which, with ordinary care in
+    execution, and with judicial care in the scrutiny, is, I can
+    now say, for all practical purposes far more infallible than
+    photography. It consists in taking a seal-like impression,
+    in common seal ink, of the markings on the skin of the two
+    forefingers of the right hand (these two being taken for
+    convenience only).
+
+    I am able to say that these marks do not (bar accidents) change
+    in the course of ten or fifteen years so much as to affect the
+    utility of the test.
+
+    The process of taking the impression is hardly more difficult
+    than that of making a fair stamp of an office seal. I have been
+    trying it in the Jail and in the Registering Office and among
+    pensioners here for some months past. I have purposely taken no
+    particular pains in explaining the process, beyond once showing
+    how it is done, and once or twice visiting the office,
+    inspecting the signatures,[5] and asking the _omlah_[6] to be
+    a little more careful. The articles necessary are such as the
+    _daftari_[7] can prepare on a mere verbal explanation.
+
+    Every person who now registers a document at Hooghly has to sign
+    his 'sign-manual'. None has offered the smallest objection, and
+    I believe that the practice, if generally adopted, will put an
+    end to all attempts at personation.
+
+    The cogency of the evidence is admitted by every one who takes
+    the trouble to compare a few signatures together, and to try
+    making a few himself. I have taken thousands now in the course
+    of the last twenty years, and (bar smudges and accidents, which
+    are rarely bad enough to be fatal) I am prepared to answer for
+    the identity of every person whose 'sign-manual' I can now
+    produce if I am confronted with him.
+
+    As an instance of the value of the thing, I might suggest that
+    if Roger Tichborne had given his 'sign-manual' on entering the
+    Army on any register, the whole Orton case would have been
+    knocked on the head in ten minutes by requiring Orton to make
+    his sign-manual alongside it for comparison.
+
+    I send this specimen to you because I believe that
+    identification is by no means the unnecessary thing in jails
+    which one might presume it should be. I don't think I need
+    dilate on that point. Here is the means of verifying the
+    identity of every man in jail with the man sentenced by the
+    court, at any moment, day or night. Call the number up and make
+    him sign. If it is he, it is he; if not, he is exposed on the
+    spot. Is No. 1302 really dead, and is that his corpse or a sham
+    one? The corpse has two fingers that will answer the question
+    at once. Is this man brought into jail the real Simon Pure
+    sentenced by the magistrate? The sign-manual on the back of the
+    magistrate's warrant is there to testify, &c.
+
+    For uses in other departments and transactions, especially among
+    illiterate people, it is available with such ease that I quite
+    think its general use would be a substantial contribution
+    towards public morality. Now that it is pretty well known
+    here, I do not believe the man lives who would dare to attempt
+    personation before the Registrar here. The mukhtears[8] all
+    know the potency of the evidence too well.
+
+    Will you kindly give the matter a little patient attention, and
+    then let me ask whether you would let me try it in other jails?
+
+    The impressions will, I doubt not, explain themselves to
+    you without more words. I will say that perhaps in a small
+    proportion of the cases that might come to question the study
+    of the seals by an expert might be advisable, but that in most
+    cases any man of judgement giving his attention to it cannot
+    fail to pronounce right. I have never seen any two signatures
+    about which I remained in doubt after sufficient care.
+
+    Kindly keep the specimens carefully.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                                    W. HERSCHEL.
+
+  [5] The words 'signature', 'sign-manual', 'seal', were used
+      indifferently in this letter for 'finger-print'.
+
+  [6] Clerks.
+
+  [7] Man in charge of stationery.
+
+  [8] Solicitors.
+
+I received one answer, but its tenor was not so encouraging as I had
+hoped. I was out of heart, and did not press my request.
+
+How much all this was regretted afterwards by others I must in simple
+justice record. It came about so quietly and so honourably that it is
+only now that I feel myself free to say publicly how deeply I was
+touched. My first substantive Commissionership had been given me by Sir
+George Campbell, to whose house I was not long after brought back in a
+dying condition from malarial fever. Sir George and his private
+secretary, Mr. Luttman Johnson, took us, my wife and myself, into the
+tenderest care. Years afterwards, in 1906, the latter befriended me in
+the kindliest manner at the annual I.C.S. garden-party, which I but
+rarely attended, and invited me to dine with him that evening. It was a
+party of seven or eight, and the next to arrive were Sir James and Lady
+Bourdillon. His name, when our host introduced us, I only recognized as
+lately Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. To my great surprise,
+before our hands parted, he told me how often he had wished to meet me,
+to express his constant regret at having let my suggestion slip through
+his hands when he was Registrar-General. He remembered my letter well,
+and had indeed taken action by inquiry concerning my doings in his
+department, but for some reason he had lost sight of the matter.
+Needless to say, we became the firmest of friends on the spot, and I had
+the pleasure of a visit from him afterwards at Oxford. It is some years
+now since he and Mr. Luttman Johnson died. None of us, as far as I know,
+has ever spoken of this fine act of Sir James's except in strict
+privacy.
+
+The Inspector of Jails of 1877, Mr. Beverley, afterwards a judge in the
+High Court of Bengal, is still alive. Writing in 1906, he says,
+regretfully, 'I have no recollection of writing the letter you refer to,
+but I know that, both as Registrar-General and as Inspector of Jails, I
+took great interest in the Finger-print system of identification, of
+which I always regarded you as the Apostle in India'. He too came to see
+me at Oxford after that, with one of his successors in the High Court.
+
+I shall say more farther on in regard to my statement in this 1877
+letter that 'these marks do not change in the course of ten or fifteen
+years'.
+
+During my stay at Hooghly, so near Calcutta, I saw more society in my
+own house than in other stations, and interested my friends with the
+novelty of finger-printing. I give a few of their names to which special
+interest attaches.
+
+Among Indian gentlemen, whose prints were taken at Hooghly in 1877, I do
+not know who are still living; I can only give the names of
+
+  (1) Bābu Dinonāth Pāl, of Hooghly;
+  (2) Bābu Lalit Mohun Singh, of Sibpur;
+  (3) Bābu Upendra Nārāyan Nandi, of Shāhāganj.
+
+Of English friends still living I am allowed to reproduce the print of
+1877, and its repeat in 1913, of Mr. Frank Courthope, well known in
+Sussex and in banking circles in London, (next page).
+
+The next is remarkable. Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., was a child of
+2¾ years old at Hooghly, 1877. By much ingratiation I succeeded in
+getting a print of his whole hand, and another of three fingers. In
+1913, when on special duty in H.M.S. 'President', he kindly gave me (not
+for the first time) a repeat, this time at the age of 38. The baby print
+bears enlargement beautifully, and I am sure my readers will be
+delighted with the comparison I am thus able to lay before them.
+
+    [Illustration: CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N.
+      1877 aet. 2¾
+      r. 3 1877 (magnified)
+      Repeat 1913 (magnified)]
+
+    [Illustration: W. F. Courthope.
+      r. 1 At Hooghly, 1877.
+      r. 1 r. 2 Oct. 21, 1913.
+      r. 2 At Hooghly, 1877.]
+
+One of the prints I value most, on personal grounds, is that of Sir
+Theodore Hope, at that time in the Legislative Council of India for
+Bombay. I grieve to say he has died since these words were written. He
+was one of my most honoured college friends in the old Haileybury days
+of 1853.
+
+Among the last prints that I took in India were two at Mussoorie, in the
+Punjab Himālayas, in Sept. 1877; one of my brother Colonel J. Herschel,
+R.E., and one of Dr. J. F. Duthie, of the Forest Department. They are
+both living still, and their repeats to-day are quite good.
+
+To return now to my letter of 1877. I was 'able to say that these marks
+do not change in the course of ten or fifteen years'. I might have said
+eighteen years, for my own marks reached back to 1859; but I was
+steering for safety.
+
+The conviction of the unchanging character of finger-patterns had,
+of course, grown on me only by degrees, as the evidence of time
+accumulated. Among my friends, from Nuddea days onwards, I often took
+second impressions, invariably drawing attention to their identity with
+the former ones. I never came upon any sign of change, bar accident. But
+such comparisons were generally limited to intervals of no more than two
+or three years, owing to the frequent changes of residence incidental to
+Indian service. As time went on it was chiefly the incessant evidence of
+my own ten fingers, and of my whole hand, which wrought in me the
+overwhelming conviction that the lines on the skin persisted
+indefinitely.
+
+    [Illustration: Colonel J. Herschel, Sept. 22, 1877.]
+
+    [Illustration: J. F. Duthie, 1877.]
+
+But besides my own evidence of eighteen years, I had that of my oldest
+college friend, William Waterfield, of almost as long. On March 31,
+1877, he and Mr. (afterwards Sir Theodore) Hope and Mrs. Hope were my
+guests at Hooghly. I took all their impressions and my own on that day,
+noting on Waterfield's that we compared it with his earliest print of
+1860, in Nuddea, seventeen years earlier. We found the agreement, of
+course, complete. Here are the facsimiles.
+
+
+    [Illustration: T. C. Hope, Bo.C.S., at Hooghly, 1877.]
+
+    [Illustration: W. Waterfield
+      July 31, 1860, Nuddea.
+      March 31, 1877, Hooghly.]
+
+If more evidence were required, I was prepared, without hesitation,
+to call on any person whose mark I had taken since I began. It was in
+fact from among those very persons, Natives as well as English, that
+thirteen years later, at Mr. Galton's request, I obtained the repeats
+which, by their much longer persistence then, went so far to prove his
+case to universal conviction.
+
+I close this record with a comparison between three of my own prints,
+taken, one in 1859, one in 1877, and the last to-day, after fifty-seven
+years. For length of persistence they cannot at present be matched.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      (_a_) (_b_) W. J. H., 1859, Arrah (aet. 26).
+      (_c_) W. J. H., March 31, 1877 (aet. 44).
+      (_d_) W. J. H., February 22, 1916 (aet. 83).]
+
+It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative, but I cannot refrain
+from offering my readers here a striking instance of the almost
+incredible persistency of atomic renovation that takes place in the pads
+of our fingers, in spite of their being more subject to wear than any
+other part of the body. The first was taken at the age of 7¾; the
+next, for Mr. Galton, nine years later. In 1913 my son was in Canada
+when I asked him to send me several repeats. Every print showed the
+minute tell-tale dot which Mr. Galton's sharp eye had noticed twenty-two
+years before. No doubt it was a natal mark. It has anyhow already
+persisted for thirty-two years.
+
+    [Illustration: A. E. H. Herschel, r. 3.
+      1881, aet. 7¾.
+      1890, aet. 17.
+      1913, aet. 40.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+When I speak of the 'discovery' of finger-prints nigh sixty years ago, I
+should wish to be understood correctly. I cannot say that I thought of
+it as such until Mr. Galton examined old records in search of earlier
+notices of the subject. What he found had been beyond my ken, and I
+never inquired for myself. The fascination of experiments and the
+impelling object of them were all I cared about. Had it been otherwise I
+should have had an open field for egoism to any extent, for no one
+questioned the novelty of the thing.
+
+The time that has elapsed since Galton's inquiries, without any material
+addition to his ascertained facts, justifies me, I venture to think, in
+speaking of my work as the 'discovery' of the value of finger-prints.
+
+I proceed to show what has been brought to light from other sources.
+
+
+Bewick.
+
+Of modern cases the first known is that of Thomas Bewick. He was a
+wood-engraver, as well as an author, and had a fancy for engraving his
+finger-mark. He printed, as far as I can ascertain, only three
+specimens, by way of ornament to his books.
+
+1. 1809. 'British Birds', p. 190. The impression of the finger appears
+as if obliterating a small scene of a cottage, trees, and a rider, but
+the paper between the lines of the finger is almost all clean.
+
+2. 1818. The 'Receipt'; of which, by Mr. Quaritch's favour, I possess
+one. This is, beyond all possibility of doubt, quite free from any
+tooling. How it was transferred to paper in those days (of which there
+is an indication) I am unable to say, but for his purposes it was an
+original 'finger-print' of Thomas Bewick. Even the fine half-tone
+process of this facsimile cannot reproduce its delicacy.
+
+    [Illustration: Thomas Bewick his mark]
+
+3. 1826. Memorial Edition of Bewick's Works, 1885, on the last page of
+the last volume, under a letter dated 1826, in which he rates some one
+for copying his woodcuts. When I saw it at the British Museum some years
+ago I thought it showed toolwork.
+
+These three seem to be all the specimens now available, and they are
+from three different fingers, of which two are certified to be his own.
+
+Gathering that Mr. Quaritch was exceptionally familiar with Bewick's
+life, I told him that I wished to leave no stone unturned to do ample
+justice to him, if he was known to have done anything more than appears
+above. Mr. Quaritch took the matter up very kindly, and finally informed
+me that he had been unable to trace any writing of Bewick's concerning
+these prints. There seems, therefore, no evidence that he ever took
+impressions of any finger but his own. Now it is true that no one of
+observant habits, and least of all an engraver, could fail to perceive
+the peculiarities of his own finger. The brick-makers of Babylon and
+Egypt, and every printer since fingers were dirtied by printer's ink,
+must have noticed them. But it is a long step from that to a study of
+other men's marks, with a view to identification. What Bewick certainly
+did do might easily have led him to such a study, but it looks as if he
+was satisfied with recognizing his own mark.
+
+Remembering, as I have already said, how one of his marks had struck my
+fancy as a boy, I am disposed to believe that, all unwittingly, I was
+guided to seize upon a thread which Bewick had let fall.
+
+
+Purkinje.
+
+Five years after Bewick, Johannes Purkinje, of Breslau, in 1823, read an
+essay which has been found and examined by Mr. Galton, and partly
+translated on p. 85 of his 1892 work. Purkinje carried his study of the
+patterns on fingers beyond all comparison with Bewick's use of them, of
+whose existence indeed he could hardly have been aware. He worked hard
+on them for a scientific (medical) purpose. It seemed to me strange
+that, going so far as he did, he had not hit upon our idea. To satisfy
+myself I read his work through in 1909. The very last sentence in it
+seemed to strike a light. Referring to 'the varieties of the tonsils,
+and especially of the papillae of the tongue, in different individuals'
+(no mention of fingers), he finishes the sentence and his essay by
+saying: 'from all which [varieties] sound materials will be furnished
+for that individual knowledge of the man which is of no less importance
+than a general knowledge of him is, especially in the practice of
+medicine.' A fine conclusion indeed, and a stimulating; but no part of
+his essay conveys an inkling of identification by means of any of the
+individual varieties on which he always lays stress, not even his
+pioneer work in the classification of the markings on fingers.
+
+    [Illustration: A _tep-sai_ of Bengal.]
+
+    [Illustration: A finger-print.]
+
+    [Illustration: THE TOKEN-SIGNATURES OF THOSE WHO CANNOT WRITE OR
+    READ, IN SEVERAL CASTES. YEAR 1865. DATE 8 FEBRUARY.
+
+    1. Cultivator; a harrow. 2. Barber; a mirror. 3. Shop-keeper;
+    scales. 4. Carpenter; a chisel. 5. A Washerman's board. 6.
+    Female; a bracelet. 7. Widow; a spindle. 8. Caste uncertain;
+    scissors. 9. Family Priest; an almanac roll.]
+
+
+Bengal.
+
+The common way for illiterates to sign is to wet the tip of one finger
+with ink from a pen, and then touch the document (leaving a small black
+blot) where we touch a wafer. The mark so made is called '_tep-sai_',
+'tep' meaning 'pressure' by touch or grip, and 'sai' meaning 'token'
+(I do not know the etymology). I ask my readers now to compare the
+'_tep-sai_' with the 'finger-print' alongside it, and to say whether the
+_tep-sai_ could afford any means of identification by comparison with
+another blot from the same finger. Illiterates who can hold a pen make a
+cross, as we do, called '_dhera-sai_'; others, more ambitious, indicate
+their caste by symbols. For the interest of the thing I give some
+tracings from a collection of such caste-marks which I had made for this
+purpose when I was Magistrate of Midnapore in 1865.
+
+When I was introducing actual registration I asked the principal member
+of my Bar to give me his opinion about the new marks. His answer was as
+follows (the English is of course his own):
+
+                                                      Hooghly,
+                                                  The 21st Aug./77.
+
+    DEAR SIR,
+
+    I have examined the impressions made in these papers, and I
+    think each can be distinguished from the others. There are also
+    so many peculiarities in each impression that it cannot be
+    forged, and I think it would be a preventive to forgery if all
+    documents, specially by females, or males who do not know to
+    read or write, would contain impressions by fingers.
+
+                                          Yours faithfully,
+                                                ESHAN CHUNDRA MITRA.
+
+I value this letter highly, for Eshan Chundra was Government Pleader at
+Hooghly, and in frequent request in Calcutta. No native lawyer of his
+large practice could have written thus if he had ever known of this
+method of signature before.
+
+Trustworthy information in my hands is to the effect that attestations
+by the finger in China are like Bengali _tep-sais_, and nothing more.
+
+
+China.
+
+The nearest approach to our use of finger-prints that I have found in
+China came to hand thus:
+
+An Oxford friend, Mr. Bullock, subsequently elected Professor of
+Chinese, had been interpreter to the Legation in Peking. Talking with
+him about the methods of signing deeds in China, he told me that the
+finger-tip (not finger-print) method was in ordinary use, but he was
+careful to point out also that to his knowledge ever since he went to
+Peking, about 1868, Chinese bankers had been in the habit of impressing
+their thumbs on the notes they issued; and he had no doubt the custom
+was much older than that. This was startling, but he kindly procured for
+me the bank-note which I here show in facsimile; with it came this
+explanation of such thumb-marks, given by his friend in China:
+
+'They are imprinted partly on the counterfoil and partly on the note
+itself, so that when presented its genuineness can be tested at once.'
+
+That is, they play the part of what is technically called the 'scroll'
+in our cheques.
+
+    [Illustration: A CHINESE BANK NOTE, 1898]
+
+My readers may accept it that the ink used was the same Indian ink with
+which the Chinese characters on the note were written. That is the
+unhesitating judgement of such an expert as Mr. Galton, who examined it.
+The difference between a water ink and printer's ink for identification
+is enormous. Blood on the fingers has occasionally left impressions that
+fortunately sufficed to reveal the murderer; but, as a rule, wet fingers
+leave only smudges as useless as this one. It is quite certain,
+therefore, that no one in the habit of impressing his thumb-mark as this
+banker did, would use water ink, if he depended on recognizing it as his
+own. In short, the smudge on the bank-note was placed there in order to
+identify the two parts of a piece of paper after severance, not to prove
+who placed it so. My readers may see what exquisite delicacy of detail
+can be obtained by printer's ink, when so desired, if they will examine
+a fine skin impression with a magnifying-glass; even the pores along the
+ridges can be seen as white dots. For practical purposes, however, such
+extreme delicacy as this is not needed.
+
+This difference of ink suggests a further remark. The Chinese have used
+printer's ink for ages. If they aimed at identification they would
+surely have discovered its great value for clear impressions, and its
+use could never have died out. On the other hand, a method of
+identification depending on water ink could never have survived for such
+strict work as our finger-prints. On the palm of the hand it can give a
+fairly good impression for such simple identification as is wanted
+(say) for passports, because the large creases will obviously be those
+of the bearer of the passport, or as obviously not. These lines of the
+palm, so well known in palmistry, are as clear to a man as the shape of
+his hand, while those on the pads of his own fingers are scarcely
+noticed even now by one man in a million. The science of identification
+by means of the pads cannot, in my opinion, date farther back than 1858,
+when I happened to use oil-ink, which was not used for _tep-sais_.
+
+The ablest defence of the claims of antiquity that I have seen is by a
+Japanese writer, Kumagusu Minakata, whose letter to 'Nature', Dec. 27,
+1894, appears to be as exhaustive as it is able; but I hope that this
+paper will satisfy him that the finger-print system of our day has no
+connexion with the methods he describes. The 'nail-marks' of which he
+speaks must be utterly useless for identification; yet he treats all
+manner of impressions alike, and tells us indeed that they are all known
+by the one name of 'hand-mark'. I fear that he has failed, like some
+other writers,[9] to see the definite force of the word 'identification'
+in the finger-print system. It means that if a man can be indicated
+whose finger-print agrees with that on a document, he is identified with
+the man who put that one there. That is all we want. But it will be seen
+that there must be two impressions at least, that will bear comparison,
+to constitute 'identification'.
+
+  [9] I include a too brief notice of the subject by Professor Giles
+      of Cambridge, in his recent work 'Civilization of China', p. 118,
+      and an article in the 'Nineteenth Century' of December 1904.
+
+None of the writers who have undertaken the defence appears to perceive
+this need of a second impression if the issue of identity turns on any
+kind of finger-mark. Repudiations cannot have been rare; tribunals must
+occasionally have been invoked; yet no instance is quoted of decision by
+demand for a second impression.
+
+It seems then that these marks were not made, as ours are, expressly to
+challenge comparison; that, in fact, they offer no points for
+comparison.
+
+In conclusion, it is hard to believe that a system so practically useful
+as this could have been known in the great lands of the East for
+generations past, without arresting the notice of Western statesmen,
+merchants, travellers, and students. Yet the knowledge never reached us.
+
+
+                                FINIS.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origin of Finger-Printing, by 
+William J. Herschel
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Origin of Finger-printing, by Sir William J. Herschel.
+    </title>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Origin of Finger-Printing, by William J. Herschel
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+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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+Title: The Origin of Finger-Printing
+
+Author: William J. Herschel
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2011 [EBook #34859]
+
+Language: English
+
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING ***
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+
+
+<h1>THE ORIGIN OF<br />
+FINGER-PRINTING</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>SIR WILLIAM J. HERSCHEL, <span class="smcap">Bart.</span></h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>HUMPHREY MILFORD<br />
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
+<small>LONDON &nbsp; &nbsp; EDINBURGH &nbsp; &nbsp; GLASGOW<br />
+NEW YORK &nbsp; &nbsp; TORONTO &nbsp; &nbsp; MELBOURNE &nbsp; &nbsp; BOMBAY</small><br />
+1916
+</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h5>PRINTED IN ENGLAND<br />
+AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS</h5>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>DEDICATION</h2>
+
+
+<h3><i>TO SIR EDWARD HENRY, G.C.V.O., K.C.B.,
+C.S.I.</i></h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><i>I am offering you this old story of the beginnings of
+Finger-printing, by way of expressing my warm and
+continuous admiration of those masterly developments of
+its original applications, whereby, first in Bengal and the
+Transvaal, and then in England, you have fashioned
+a weapon of penetrating certainty for the sterner needs
+of Justice.</i></p>
+
+<p class="author"><i>W. J. HERSCHEL.</i></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; <i>June, 1916.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following pages have two objects: first, to
+place on record the genesis of the Finger-print
+method of personal identification, from its discovery
+in Bengal in 1858, till its public demonstration
+there in 1877-8; secondly, to examine the scanty
+suggestions of evidence that this use of our fingers
+had been foreshadowed in Europe more than a
+hundred years ago, and had indeed been general in
+ancient times, especially in China.</p>
+
+<p>In later years, and in energetic hands, the method
+has been developed into a system far more effective
+than anything I contemplated, and I do not go into
+that part of the story; but I believe these pages will
+suffice to show the originality of my study of its two
+essential features, the strict individuality and the
+stubborn persistence of the patterns on our fingers.</p>
+
+<p>The gift granted to me of lighting upon a discovery
+which promised escape from one great difficulty
+of administration in India is more than ever appreciated
+by me since I have lived to see the promise
+wonderfully fulfilled there, and in other lands as well.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of interest I give, among the illustrations,
+several examples of late 'repeats' taken
+many years after I left India; but these do not
+belong to my story.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='right'><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Bengalee contract with R&#257;jyadhar K&#333;n&#257;i, 1858. (<i>Collotype</i>)</td><td align='right'><i>Between pages</i> <a href="#Page_8">8</a> <i>and</i> <a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, Medical Officer at Arrah Station, June 1859</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Captain H. Raban, Chief of the Police in Lower Bengal, July 29,1860</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of the Mah&#257;r&#257;j&#257; of Nuddea, April 13, 1862</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Sir Charles Howard, Superintendent of Police, Nuddea, April 13, 1862; and repeat, 1908</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Sir Alfred C. Lyall, 1877; and repeat, 1908</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Captain A. Coleman, P. &amp; O. SS. 'Mongolia', February 1877</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-prints of Bech&#257; R&#257;m D&#257;s Adhik&#257;ri, (<i>a</i>) made in 1877, (<i>b</i>) made in 1892</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of W. F. Courthope, 1877; and repeat, 1913</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., 1877, aet. 2&frac34; years; and repeat, 1913. (<i>Collotype</i>)</td><td align='right'><i>Facing</i> <a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., September 22, 1877</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Dr. J. F. Duthie, September 22, 1877</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-print of Sir Theodore Hope, Bo.C.S., 1877</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-prints of William Waterfield, B.C.S., (<i>a</i>) July 31, 1860, (<i>b</i>) March 31, 1877</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-prints of W. J. Herschel, (<i>a</i>) June 1859, (<i>b</i>) July 1859, (<i>c</i>) March 31, 1877, (<i>d</i>) February 22, 1916</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-prints, enlarged, of A. E. H. Herschel: 1881, aet. 7&frac34;; 1890, aet. 17; 1913, aet. 40</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>'Thomas Bewick his mark'</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A 'tep-sai' of Bengal compared with a finger-print</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Caste-marks of illiterates, 1865</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Finger-mark on a Chinese Bank-note. (<i>Collotype</i>)</td><td align='right'><i>Facing</i> <a href="#Page_38">38</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING</h2>
+
+
+<p>In 1858, after five years' service, as an Assistant
+under the old East India Company, in the interior
+of Bengal, I was in charge of my first subdivision,
+the head-quarters of which were then at Jungipoor,
+on the upper reaches of the Hooghly river. My
+executive and magisterial experience had by that
+time forced on me that distrust of all evidence
+tendered in Court which did so much to cloud our
+faith in the people around us. We cannot be too
+thankful that things have greatly improved in India
+in the last sixty years, but the time of which I am
+speaking was the very worst time of my life in this
+respect. I remember only too well writing in great
+despondency to one of the best and soberest-minded
+of my senior companions at Haileybury<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> about my
+despair of any good coming from orders and decisions
+based on such slippery facts, and the comfort I
+found in his sensible reply.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/i009.jpg" width="480" height="480" alt="Contract" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Contract for 2,000 maunds of road-metalling, between W. J. Herschel
+and Rajyadhar Konai, in Konai&#39;s handwriting</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It happened, in July of that year, that I was
+starting the first bit of road metalling at Jungipoor,
+and invited tenders for a supply of 'ghooting'
+(a good binding material for light roads).
+A native named R&#257;jyadhar K&#333;n&#257;i, of the village
+of Nist&#257;, came to terms with me, and at my
+desire drew up our agreement in his own hand,
+in true commercial style. He was about to
+sign it in the usual way, at the upper right-hand
+corner, when I stopped him in order to read it
+myself; and it then occurred to me to try an
+experiment by taking the stamp of his hand, by
+way of signature instead of writing. There was
+nothing very original about that, as an idea. Many
+must have heard of some such use of a man's hand;
+and the correspondence that has taken place has
+brought to light old instances of the hand, or the
+nail of a finger, or the teeth in one's mouth, being
+used to certify a man's act, or a woman's. But
+these have all been isolated instances. Sir Francis
+Galton, however, has pointed out<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> that in our own
+times the engraver Bewick had a fancy for engraving
+his thumb-mark, with his name attached, as
+vignettes, or as colophons, in books which he published.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+As a boy I had loved Bewick on Birds:
+I regret that it is not now to be found in our library.
+Galton's remark has reminded me that I used to
+see the thumb-mark there, as well as I recollect, in
+an ornamental title-page. I mention this because
+I dare say it had something to do with my fascination
+over K&#333;n&#257;i's hand-markings. If so, the influence
+was unknown to me. The absorbing interests of
+manhood had blotted out, not Bewick, but his
+thumb-mark, from my memory. However that
+may be, I was only wishing to frighten K&#333;n&#257;i out
+of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter.
+He, of course, had never dreamt of such an attestation,
+but fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm
+and fingers over with the home-made oil-ink used
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on
+the back of the contract, and we studied it together,
+with a good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing
+his palm with mine on another impression. Here
+is a facsimile of the whole document, made by
+the Clarendon Press. I was so pleased with
+the experiment that, having to make a second
+contract with K&#333;n&#257;i, I made him attest it in the
+same way. One of these contracts I gave to
+Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton for his celebrated
+paper read before the Royal Society, November
+1890, to which body he presented it; the other lies
+before me now. Trials with my own fingers soon
+showed the advantage of using them instead of
+the whole hand for the purpose then in view,
+i.e. for securing a signature which the writer would
+obviously hesitate to disown. That he might be
+infallibly convicted of perjury, if he did, is a very
+different matter. That was not settled, and could
+not have been settled, to the satisfaction of Courts
+of Justice, till, after many years, abundant agreement
+had been reached among ordinary people.
+The very possibility of such a 'sanction' (to use
+a technical expression) to the use of a finger-print
+did not dawn upon me till after long experience, and
+even then it became no more than a personal conviction
+for many years more. The decisiveness of a
+finger-print is now one of the most powerful aids to
+Justice. Our possession of it derives from the
+impression of K&#333;n&#257;i's hand in 1858.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 398px;">
+<img src="images/i008.jpg" width="398" height="640" alt="KONAI'S HAND" title="" />
+<span class="caption">KONAI&#39;S HAND<br />
+Bengal 1858</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Of trials with my own fingers the oldest impression
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+I possess was taken in June 1859, when I first
+began to keep records. I had been transferred to
+be Magistrate of Arrah, the most north-westerly
+district of Bengal, where the Mutiny still left work
+to do which allowed little time for private hobbies;
+but I took so many prints among the society of the
+Station, as well as among Indians of all classes, that
+my 'fad' about them was well known. The Medical
+Officer of Arrah was Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, who
+naturally took great interest in the subject. Twenty-one
+years later, in 1880, he was still there, and sent
+me a 'repeat' print of his fingers. Here is a facsimile
+of his first Arrah impression. In 1890,
+being in England, he visited Galton's Laboratory,
+and gave a second repeat (after thirty-one years)
+which was used in 'Finger-prints' (1892), p. 93, to
+support Mr. Galton's evidence of 'Persistency'. In
+the facsimile 'Collection 1858-1913', which I am
+attaching to some of the copies of this narrative,
+will be found other prints which I took at Arrah of
+my whole hand and of my right foot. They agree
+irresistibly with prints taken now after an interval
+of fifty-seven years.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i010.jpg" width="640" height="457" alt="R. F. Hutchinson" title="" />
+<span class="caption">R. F. Hutchinson, June 1859, Medical Officer at Arrah Station.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In 1860 I was sent as Magistrate to Nuddea,
+nearer to Calcutta. The Indigo disturbances in the
+district had given rise to a great deal of violence,
+litigation, and fraud; forgery and perjury were
+rampant. The rent-rolls of the ryots put into Court
+by the Zemindars; the pottahs (agreements for rent)
+purporting to be issued by them to each ryot, put
+in by the latter; the kabooliyats (acceptances) purporting
+to be signed by the ryot, and tendered in
+evidence against him; all these documents were
+frequently worth no more than the paper on which
+they were written. In my own jail a notorious
+convict was found making clay seals of well-known
+landlords, and forging their signatures on pottahs
+smuggled into his hands. He was detected by the
+colour of the floor of his cell, where he kept his
+stock-in-trade buried. Things were so bad in this
+and other ways that the administration of Civil
+Justice had unusual difficulty in preserving its
+dignity. I was driven to take up finger-prints
+now with a definite object before me, and for
+three years continued taking a very large number
+from all sorts and conditions of men. I give here
+some selected impressions of friends taken in
+Nuddea during the years 1860, 1861, and 1862, in
+order of date, and names of some others.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<p>1860, July. Claude Brown, a prominent merchant
+of Calcutta, who was making a tour in the
+Indigo districts, and was at the time my guest.</p>
+
+<p>1860, July 29. Captain H. Raban, Head of the
+Bengal Police, sent to Nuddea on account of its
+disturbed state; also my guest. He took extreme
+interest in the evidence of his own imprint. It
+was my habit, of course, to give duplicates of his
+'mark' to every one of importance.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/i014.jpg" width="336" height="391" alt="Captain H. Raban" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Captain H. Raban, Head of the Police in Lower Bengal, July 29, 1860.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>1860, July 31. W. Waterfield, B.C.S., a college
+friend, afterwards Comptroller-General of the
+Treasuries of India.  I have several 'repeats' of
+his; see especially p. 29.</p>
+
+<p>1861, June 24. Ogilvie Temple, Judge of the
+Court of Small Causes, Kooshtea.</p>
+
+<p>1862, April 13. At a gathering at my house at
+Kishnagar I had the good fortune to secure the
+prints of many other notables of the district.</p>
+
+<p>The Mah&#257;r&#257;j&#257; of Nuddea. He was the highest
+of the old nobility of Bengal. He was much struck,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of the
+'pattern' on one of his fingers at the core.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i015a.jpg" width="640" height="322" alt="Maharaja of Nuddea." title="" />
+<span class="caption">April 13, 1862.<br />
+Mah&#257;r&#257;j&#257; of Nuddea.
+</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Same day. E. Grey, B.C.S. A college friend,
+on my staff, afterwards Civil and Sessions Judge.
+He, I am happy to say, is still alive (1916), and his
+'repeat' is quite good now.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i015b.jpg" width="640" height="347" alt="A. C. Howard." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Sir Charles Howard.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Same day. A. C. Howard, District Superintendent
+of Police, Nuddea, afterwards Assistant Commissioner
+at Scotland Yard, and knighted for his
+services there, as Sir Charles Howard. He gladly
+gave me a 'repeat' in London after forty-six years.
+It will be seen how good the persistence has been.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Same day. Three other Assistant Magistrates on
+the unusually large staff of the district. Among
+these was F. K. Hewitt, B.C.S., afterwards Commissioner
+of Chota Nagpur. Twenty-six years later,
+at my request, he furnished Sir Francis Galton
+with the 'repeat' printed on p. 93 of his famous
+work 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892). I have
+much later repeats taken at Oxford.</p>
+
+<p>Same day. Ninian H. Thomson, Judge of the
+Court of Small Causes. He kindly sent me a repeat
+twenty-eight years later from Florence, and this
+also appears in the same work, p. 93.</p>
+
+<p>Very early in my experiments I entertained misgivings
+about the possibility of the impressions
+being forged by the professional criminals whom
+we had so much reason to fear. I therefore submitted
+some specimens to the best artists in Calcutta
+to imitate. Their failure sufficed to dispel all anxiety
+on that point. None of them come near Bewick's
+engravings in accuracy.</p>
+
+<p>Before I left Kishnagar (Nuddea) the violence of
+the Indigo disturbances had been subdued, but the
+Courts became choked with suits for enhancement
+of rent upon the recalcitrant cultivators, and the
+sore point about the genuineness of leases, &amp;c.,
+became aggravated. I took courage from despair,
+and in my judicial capacity (if I remember right)
+addressed an official letter to the Government of
+Bengal, definitely advocating administrative action
+to enforce the use of 'finger-prints' by both parties
+as necessary to the validity of these documents.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+Unfortunately I kept no private draft of this letter,
+and have lost the date, probably 1862 or 1863. It
+must, however, be on record, both in Nuddea and
+in the Calcutta Secretariat. Nothing came of it,
+and I took no more pains about it. But a few
+years ago I was pleasantly reminded by Mr. Horace
+Cockerell, for some time Secretary to the Government,
+who gave me the history of its reception,
+viz. that it had been deemed inadvisable, when
+things were quieting down, to raise a new controversy
+of the sort. He added that it was a matter
+of regret now, that no action whatever had been
+taken, but he pointed out that legislation would
+have been necessary to make the new marks
+admissible in evidence, and to get such a law on
+the spur of the moment would have been hopeless.
+That difficulty had certainly never occurred to me
+when I made the suggestion. But how weighty an
+objection it was is shown by the fact that it was
+long, even after the value of finger-prints had been
+established in practice, before the High Court of
+Calcutta, in a leading case, declared that the evidence
+could not be excluded, nay more, that it was cogent.
+This was many years before such a case in England.
+At the time I wrote it is quite certain that no Court
+in India, no pleader, no solicitor had ever recognized
+such signatures as these.</p>
+
+<p>In 1863 I took my first furlough to England,
+which changed the current of my thoughts. But
+I found that my own people had been more interested
+than I had supposed by my correspondence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+on the subject. Among my brother Alexander's
+papers was found after his death a letter telling
+him my ideas, and asking him to devise a roller
+of some sort, for oil-ink, better than my soft
+office pads.</p>
+
+<p>During that and later furloughs I took no public
+steps about the subject. In society, of course, it
+was looked on simply as a hobby, attracting no
+more serious attention than did Bewick's fancy for
+engraving his thumb-mark in his day. But the
+warm interest shown by my own people, who had
+known my early troubles in India, determined me,
+during my last furlough, that before completing
+my service I would give the thing an open official
+trial on my own responsibility. I sailed, 1877, in
+the P. and O. steamer 'Mongolia', Captain Coleman,
+with my sister, now Mrs. Maclear, who was an
+enthusiast on my side. We roused attention
+enough on board in the Indian Ocean to obtain the
+finger-prints of the Captain and many of his officers,
+stewards, and kal&#257;shis; also of many of the passengers,
+among whom I may especially mention
+Sir Alfred and Lady Lyall (as they afterwards
+became), Colonel Garrow Waterfield, and Colonel
+Chermside. Some thirty years later, 1908,
+Sir A. Lyall permitted me to take and use his
+repeat impression. Here are facsimiles of both,
+and also of Captain Coleman's, the pattern of
+which was thought then to deserve enlargement.
+Friendship, which for family reasons sprang up
+between Colonel Garrow Waterfield and myself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+led him to take special interest in my project, and
+I cannot doubt that he carried that with him to the
+Punjab, where his reputation was high. Most of the
+other saloon passengers were business men on their
+way back to the Far East, and left us at Ceylon.
+If any one of them had heard of the use of these
+marks, say in China, I could not but have been told
+of it. But there was not a breath of the sort. I
+give here a list of the remaining signatures still in
+my possession, in case any may meet with recognition:
+F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A.
+Owen, J. Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O.
+Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch, Mrs. Philip.
+It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such
+a novel and evidently useful idea would have spread
+by their means wherever they went. My exhibition
+was frequently asked for, and I always gave a
+duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes
+added one of my own to show the extraordinary
+persistence of patterns after nigh twenty years.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i019a.jpg" width="640" height="373" alt="Sir A. C. Lyall." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Sir Alfred C. Lyall.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i019b.jpg" width="640" height="314" alt="Capt. A. Coleman." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Capt. A. Coleman (P. &amp; O. SS.
+&#39;Mongolia&#39;), February, 1877.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p><p>On my return to India, my position as Magistrate
+and Collector at Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me
+the control, not only of criminal courts, but of the
+jail, and of the modern Department for Registration
+of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the
+payment of Government pensions. Registration,
+of course, appealed most strongly to my desires, but
+the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained,
+and meanwhile the few pensioners enabled me to
+break the ice myself. I was not a little anxious lest,
+officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for
+their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges
+of the Mutiny, so near Hooghly, was indelible. In
+private experiments I had never met any such
+difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one,
+and I thought it well, when acting officially, to take
+every precaution. I was careful, therefore, from the
+first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the
+impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course,
+the pad and the ink made by one of themselves
+from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+in constant use for the office seals in the several
+departments.</p>
+
+<p>The glad approval of the pensioners was a great
+pleasure to me, and made the other registration
+work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it unhesitatingly,
+and enjoyed the fun of explaining the
+'Sahib's hikmat'. No one ever hesitated to do as
+he was told, or to take away duplicates for talk
+at home. The process of registration at that time
+was regulated by a late law devised to afford the
+best security then possible for the genuineness of
+deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures,
+whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in
+the case of women mostly, by touching the paper
+with the tip of the finger wetted with ink from the
+clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the
+presence and under the eye of the Registrar, who,
+in most cases, had to rely on the sworn evidence of
+witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the
+executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible
+for using his intelligence in each case to prevent
+imposture. His part of the work was never impeached,
+that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless,
+fraudulent attempts did still come to light. Signatures
+were still denied; personations in presenting
+false deeds did take place, either to swindle, or, in
+one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at
+Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other
+deed registered there with the new safeguard would
+ever be repudiated by the actual executant. I have
+had to think otherwise since then, because many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+years afterwards a man (in another district) who had
+given his finger-print before a Registrar repudiated
+it. He was summoned to give his evidence on oath.
+It was found that he had cut off the joints of his
+fingers, hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the
+witnesses so as to prove that he was <i>not</i> the man
+they had recognized before the Registrar. The High
+Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and
+confirmed the facts of the registration, with the
+necessary consequence to the offender for his perjury.
+I do not know of any other repudiation
+having been pressed to this bitter end in India or
+elsewhere. The contrast between the inherent weakness
+of the old law and the efficiency of the new test
+could not be better exemplified. This case gave
+the first stern blow to the foul mischief that had
+developed such cruel proportions in India under
+cover of our conservative legal habits.</p>
+
+<p>The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly
+in 1877 was thus:&mdash;After the legal formalities of
+registration had been observed, the Registrar made
+the person print his two fingers on the deed, and
+again in a diary book which was kept by him in the
+office, for my own inspection rather than as evidence.
+It is, no doubt, preserved at Hooghly still.</p>
+
+<p>It was from this book that cuttings were made at
+my request in 1892 by Mr. Duke, the magistrate,
+which formed the subject of Sir Francis Galton's
+volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which,
+for its cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must
+refer my readers. I annex a tracing of one of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+enlargements, by permission of the London University,
+to which he left his great collection.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 607px;">
+<img src="images/i023.jpg" width="607" height="480" alt="Becha Ram Das Adhikari." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Bech&#257; R&#257;m D&#257;s Adhik&#257;ri. From tracings by Mr. Galton of
+enlargements, (a) Made in 1877 when registering his deed; (b) made
+in 1892 for Mr. Galton.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another form in which I made use of the new
+system for public purposes was in the jail. The
+common device of hiring a substitute to serve out
+a term was not unknown, but it involved a long
+risk of detection. A safer but very costly, and
+therefore rare, device was sham death and a purchased
+corpse, affording comparative safety after
+escape. A case of this kind, carried out with the
+aid of an irregularly appointed doctor, was strongly
+suspected by me at Hooghly.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> The precaution I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>adopted was to take the finger-prints of each offender
+when passing sentence of imprisonment, both on
+the records of the Court and also on the warrant to
+the jailer.</p>
+
+<p>All these processes were in full use when I left
+India, on the completion of twenty-five years' service,
+in 1878. I was by that time almost broken down in
+health, and more so in energy. Sir Ashley Eden, the
+Lieutenant-Governor, offered me a substantive Commissionership.
+I had already held  such an appointment
+twice, and nothing but an honest sense of
+inability made me decline it now. I mention this
+in explanation of the slackness on my part, but for
+which the finger-print system would certainly have
+been put in force in the Registration Department, at
+least throughout Bengal, forty years ago. As it was,
+I only tried to induce the Inspector of Jails and the
+Registrar-General of the day to give the system a trial.
+Fortunately I kept an office copy of this letter,
+which, in reply to outside criticism, I published in
+'Nature', Nov. 22, 1894, and repeat here to complete
+this narrative.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<h4>(<span class="smcap">True Copy of Office Copy.</span>)</h4>
+
+<p class="author">
+<span class="smcap">Hooghly</span>, <i>August 15, 1877</i>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear B&mdash;&mdash;</span>, &mdash;I enclose a paper which looks unusual,
+but which I hope has some value. It exhibits a method of
+identification of persons, which, with ordinary care in execution,
+and with judicial care in the scrutiny, is, I can now
+say, for all practical purposes far more infallible than photography.
+It consists in taking a seal-like impression, in
+common seal ink, of the markings on the skin of the two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+forefingers of the right hand (these two being taken for
+convenience only).</p>
+
+<p>I am able to say that these marks do not (bar accidents)
+change in the course of ten or fifteen years so much as to
+affect the utility of the test.</p>
+
+<p>The process of taking the impression is hardly more
+difficult than that of making a fair stamp of an office seal.
+I have been trying it in the Jail and in the Registering
+Office and among pensioners here for some months past. I
+have purposely taken no particular pains in explaining the
+process, beyond once showing how it is done, and once
+or twice visiting the office, inspecting the signatures,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> and
+asking the <i>omlah</i><a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> to be a little more careful. The articles
+necessary are such as the <i>daftari</i><a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> can prepare on a mere
+verbal explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Every person who now registers a document at Hooghly
+has to sign his 'sign-manual'. None has offered the smallest
+objection, and I believe that the practice, if generally
+adopted, will put an end to all attempts at personation.</p>
+
+<p>The cogency of the evidence is admitted by every one
+who takes the trouble to compare a few signatures together,
+and to try making a few himself. I have taken
+thousands now in the course of the last twenty years, and
+(bar smudges and accidents, which are rarely bad enough to
+be fatal) I am prepared to answer for the identity of every
+person whose 'sign-manual' I can now produce if I am
+confronted with him.</p>
+
+<p>As an instance of the value of the thing, I might suggest
+that if Roger Tichborne had given his 'sign-manual' on
+entering the Army on any register, the whole Orton case
+would have been knocked on the head in ten minutes by
+requiring Orton to make his sign-manual alongside it for
+comparison.</p>
+
+<p>I send this specimen to you because I believe that identification
+is by no means the unnecessary thing in jails which one
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>might presume it should be. I don't think I need dilate on
+that point. Here is the means of verifying the identity of
+every man in jail with the man sentenced by the court, at
+any moment, day or night. Call the number up and make
+him sign. If it is he, it is he; if not, he is exposed on the
+spot. Is No. 1302 really dead, and is that his corpse or
+a sham one? The corpse has two fingers that will answer
+the question at once. Is this man brought into jail the real
+Simon Pure sentenced by the magistrate? The sign-manual
+on the back of the magistrate's warrant is there to testify, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>For uses in other departments and transactions, especially
+among illiterate people, it is available with such ease that
+I quite think its general use would be a substantial contribution
+towards public morality. Now that it is pretty well
+known here, I do not believe the man lives who would dare
+to attempt personation before the Registrar here. The
+mukhtears<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> all know the potency of the evidence too well.</p>
+
+<p>Will you kindly give the matter a little patient attention,
+and then let me ask whether you would let me try it in
+other jails?</p>
+
+<p>The impressions will, I doubt not, explain themselves to
+you without more words. I will say that perhaps in a small
+proportion of the cases that might come to question the
+study of the seals by an expert might be advisable, but that
+in most cases any man of judgement giving his attention to
+it cannot fail to pronounce right. I have never seen any
+two signatures about which I remained in doubt after
+sufficient care.</p>
+
+<p>Kindly keep the specimens carefully.</p>
+
+<p class="regards">Yours sincerely,</p>
+
+<p class="author"><span class="smcap">W. Herschel</span>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I received one answer, but its tenor was not so
+encouraging as I had hoped. I was out of heart,
+and did not press my request.</p>
+
+<p>How much all this was regretted afterwards by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+others I must in simple justice record. It came
+about so quietly and so honourably that it is only
+now that I feel myself free to say publicly how
+deeply I was touched. My first substantive Commissionership
+had been given me by Sir George Campbell,
+to whose house I was not long after brought
+back in a dying condition from malarial fever.
+Sir George and his private secretary, Mr. Luttman
+Johnson, took us, my wife and myself, into the
+tenderest care. Years afterwards, in 1906, the
+latter befriended me in the kindliest manner at the
+annual I.C.S. garden-party, which I but rarely
+attended, and invited me to dine with him that
+evening. It was a party of seven or eight, and the
+next to arrive were Sir James and Lady Bourdillon.
+His name, when our host introduced us, I only recognized
+as lately Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.
+To my great surprise, before our hands parted, he
+told me how often he had wished to meet me, to
+express his constant regret at having let my suggestion
+slip through his hands when he was Registrar-General.
+He remembered my letter well, and had
+indeed taken action by inquiry concerning my doings
+in his department, but for some reason he had lost
+sight of the matter. Needless to say, we became the
+firmest of friends on the spot, and I had the pleasure
+of a visit from him afterwards at Oxford. It is some
+years now since he and Mr. Luttman Johnson died.
+None of us, as far as I know, has ever spoken of this
+fine act of Sir James's except in strict privacy.</p>
+
+<p>The Inspector of Jails of 1877, Mr. Beverley,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+afterwards a judge in the High Court of Bengal, is
+still alive. Writing in 1906, he says, regretfully,
+'I have no recollection of writing the letter you
+refer to, but I know that, both as Registrar-General
+and as Inspector of Jails, I took great interest in
+the Finger-print system of identification, of which
+I always regarded you as the Apostle in India'.
+He too came to see me at Oxford after that, with
+one of his successors in the High Court.</p>
+
+<p>I shall say more farther on in regard to my
+statement in this 1877 letter that 'these marks do
+not change in the course of ten or fifteen years'.</p>
+
+<p>During my stay at Hooghly, so near Calcutta,
+I saw more society in my own house than in other
+stations, and interested my friends with the novelty
+of finger-printing. I give a few of their names to
+which special interest attaches.</p>
+
+<p>Among Indian gentlemen, whose prints were taken
+at Hooghly in 1877, I do not know who are still
+living; I can only give the names of</p>
+
+<p>(1) B&#257;bu Dinon&#257;th P&#257;l, of Hooghly;</p>
+
+<p>(2) B&#257;bu Lalit Mohun Singh, of Sibpur;</p>
+
+<p>(3) B&#257;bu Upendra N&#257;r&#257;yan Nandi, of Sh&#257;h&#257;ganj.</p>
+
+<p>Of English friends still living I am allowed to
+reproduce the print of 1877, and its repeat in 1913,
+of Mr. Frank Courthope, well known in Sussex and
+in banking circles in London, (next page).</p>
+
+<p>The next is remarkable. Captain V. H. Haggard,
+R.N., was a child of 2&frac34; years old at Hooghly,
+1877. By much ingratiation I succeeded in getting
+a print of his whole hand, and another of three
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+fingers. In 1913, when on special duty in H.M.S.
+'President', he kindly gave me (not for the first
+time) a repeat, this time at the age of 38. The
+baby print bears enlargement beautifully, and I am
+sure my readers will be delighted with the comparison
+I am thus able to lay before them.</p>
+
+
+<p>One of the prints I value most, on personal
+grounds, is that of Sir Theodore Hope, at that time
+in the Legislative Council of India for Bombay. I
+grieve to say he has died since these words were
+written. He was one of my most honoured college
+friends in the old Haileybury days of 1853.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i030.jpg" width="640" height="327" alt="W. F. Courthope." title="" />
+<span class="caption">W. F. Courthope.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Among the last prints that I took in India were
+two at Mussoorie, in the Punjab Him&#257;layas, in
+Sept. 1877; one of my brother Colonel J. Herschel,
+R.E., and one of Dr. J. F. Duthie, of the
+Forest Department. They are both living still, and
+their repeats to-day are quite good.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i029.jpg" width="640" height="368" alt="CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N." title="" />
+<span class="caption">CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>To return now to my letter of 1877. I was
+'able to say that these marks do not change in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+the course of ten or fifteen years'. I might have
+said eighteen years, for my own marks reached back
+to 1859; but I was steering for safety.</p>
+
+<p>The conviction of the unchanging character of
+finger-patterns had, of course, grown on me only
+by degrees, as the evidence of time accumulated.
+Among my friends, from Nuddea days onwards,
+I often took second impressions, invariably drawing
+attention to their identity with the former ones. I
+never came upon any sign of change, bar accident.
+But such comparisons were generally limited to
+intervals of no more than two or three years, owing
+to the frequent changes of residence incidental to
+Indian service. As time went on it was chiefly the
+incessant evidence of my own ten fingers, and of my
+whole hand, which wrought in me the overwhelming
+conviction that the lines on the skin persisted
+indefinitely.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/i031a.jpg" width="336" height="336" alt="Colonel J. Herschel." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Colonel J. Herschel, Sept. 22, 1877.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/i031b.jpg" width="336" height="336" alt="J. F. Duthie." title="" />
+<span class="caption">J. F. Duthie, 1877.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But besides my own evidence of eighteen years, I
+had that of my oldest college friend, William Waterfield,
+of almost as long. On March 31, 1877, he and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+Mr. (afterwards Sir Theodore) Hope and Mrs. Hope
+were my guests at Hooghly. I took all their impressions
+and my own on that day, noting on Waterfield's
+that we compared it with his earliest print of
+1860, in Nuddea, seventeen years earlier. We found
+the agreement, of course, complete. Here are the
+facsimiles.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/i032a.jpg" width="480" height="198" alt="T. C. Hope." title="" />
+<span class="caption">T. C. Hope, Bo.C.S., at Hooghly, 1877.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/i032b.jpg" width="480" height="260" alt="W. Waterfield." title="" />
+<span class="caption">W. Waterfield.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>If more evidence were required, I was prepared,
+without hesitation, to call on any person whose mark
+I had taken since I began. It was in fact from
+among those very persons, Natives as well as English,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+that thirteen years later, at Mr. Galton's request,
+I obtained the repeats which, by their much longer
+persistence then, went so far to prove his case to
+universal conviction.</p>
+
+<p>I close this record with a comparison between
+three of my own prints, taken, one in 1859, one in
+1877, and the last to-day, after fifty-seven years.
+For length of persistence they cannot at present be
+matched.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/i033.jpg" width="480" height="523" alt="W. J. H." title="" />
+<span class="caption">(<i>a</i>) (<i>b</i>) W. J. H., 1859, Arrah (aet. 26).<br />
+(<i>c</i>) W. J. H., March 31, 1877 (aet. 44).<br />
+(<i>d</i>) W. J. H., February 22, 1916 (aet. 83).</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative,
+but I cannot refrain from offering my readers here
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+a striking instance of the almost incredible persistency
+of atomic renovation that takes place in the
+pads of our fingers, in spite of their being more
+subject to wear than any other part of the body.
+The first was taken at the age of 7&frac34;; the next, for
+Mr. Galton, nine years later. In 1913 my son was
+in Canada when I asked him to send me several
+repeats. Every print showed the minute tell-tale
+dot which Mr. Galton's sharp eye had noticed twenty-two
+years before. No doubt it was a natal mark.
+It has anyhow already persisted for thirty-two
+years.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/i034.jpg" width="640" height="316" alt="A. E. H. Herschel" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A. E. H. Herschel, r. 3.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+<h2>APPENDIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When I speak of the 'discovery' of finger-prints
+nigh sixty years ago, I should wish to be understood
+correctly. I cannot say that I thought of it as such
+until Mr. Galton examined old records in search of
+earlier notices of the subject. What he found had
+been beyond my ken, and I never inquired for
+myself. The fascination of experiments and the
+impelling object of them were all I cared about.
+Had it been otherwise I should have had an open
+field for egoism to any extent, for no one questioned
+the novelty of the thing.</p>
+
+<p>The time that has elapsed since Galton's inquiries,
+without any material addition to his ascertained
+facts, justifies me, I venture to think, in speaking
+of my work as the 'discovery' of the value of finger-prints.</p>
+
+<p>I proceed to show what has been brought to light
+from other sources.</p>
+
+
+<h3>Bewick.</h3>
+
+<p>Of modern cases the first known is that of
+Thomas Bewick. He was a wood-engraver, as well
+as an author, and had a fancy for engraving his
+finger-mark. He printed, as far as I can ascertain,
+only three specimens, by way of ornament to his
+books.</p>
+
+<p>1. 1809. 'British Birds', p. 190. The impression
+of the finger appears as if obliterating a small scene
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+of a cottage, trees, and a rider, but the paper
+between the lines of the finger is almost all
+clean.</p>
+
+<p>2. 1818. The 'Receipt'; of which, by Mr.
+Quaritch's favour, I possess one. This is, beyond
+all possibility of doubt, quite free from any tooling.
+How it was transferred to paper in those days (of
+which there is an indication) I am unable to say,
+but for his purposes it was an original 'finger-print'
+of Thomas Bewick. Even the fine half-tone
+process of this facsimile cannot reproduce its
+delicacy.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/i036.jpg" width="336" height="336" alt="Thomas Bewick" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Thomas Bewick his mark</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. 1826. Memorial Edition of Bewick's Works,
+1885, on the last page of the last volume, under
+a letter dated 1826, in which he rates some one for
+copying his woodcuts. When I saw it at the British
+Museum some years ago I thought it showed toolwork.</p>
+
+<p>These three seem to be all the specimens now
+available, and they are from three different fingers,
+of which two are certified to be his own.</p>
+
+<p>Gathering that Mr. Quaritch was exceptionally
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+familiar with Bewick's life, I told him that I wished
+to leave no stone unturned to do ample justice to
+him, if he was known to have done anything more
+than appears above. Mr. Quaritch took the matter
+up very kindly, and finally informed me that he
+had been unable to trace any writing of Bewick's
+concerning these prints. There seems, therefore,
+no evidence that he ever took impressions of any
+finger but his own. Now it is true that no one of
+observant habits, and least of all an engraver, could
+fail to perceive the peculiarities of his own finger.
+The brick-makers of Babylon and Egypt, and every
+printer since fingers were dirtied by printer's ink,
+must have noticed them. But it is a long step from
+that to a study of other men's marks, with a view to
+identification. What Bewick certainly did do might
+easily have led him to such a study, but it looks as
+if he was satisfied with recognizing his own mark.</p>
+
+<p>Remembering, as I have already said, how one of
+his marks had struck my fancy as a boy, I am disposed
+to believe that, all unwittingly, I was guided
+to seize upon a thread which Bewick had let fall.</p>
+
+
+<h3>Purkinje.</h3>
+
+<p>Five years after Bewick, Johannes Purkinje, of
+Breslau, in 1823, read an essay which has been found
+and examined by Mr. Galton, and partly translated
+on p. 85 of his 1892 work. Purkinje carried
+his study of the patterns on fingers beyond all comparison
+with Bewick's use of them, of whose existence
+indeed he could hardly have been aware. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+worked hard on them for a scientific (medical) purpose.
+It seemed to me strange that, going so far as
+he did, he had not hit upon our idea. To satisfy
+myself I read his work through in 1909. The very
+last sentence in it seemed to strike a light. Referring
+to 'the varieties of the tonsils, and especially of the
+papillae of the tongue, in different individuals' (no
+mention of fingers), he finishes the sentence and his
+essay by saying: 'from all which [varieties] sound
+materials will be furnished for that individual knowledge
+of the man which is of no less importance than
+a general knowledge of him is, especially in the
+practice of medicine.' A fine conclusion indeed,
+and a stimulating; but no part of his essay conveys
+an inkling of identification by means of any of the
+individual varieties on which he always lays stress,
+not even his pioneer work in the classification of
+the markings on fingers.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 448px;">
+<img src="images/i038.jpg" width="448" height="213" alt="A tep-sai of Bengal." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A <i>tep-sai</i> of Bengal. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+ &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A finger-print.</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Bengal.</h3>
+
+<p>The common way for illiterates to
+sign is to wet the tip of one finger with ink from
+a pen, and then touch the document (leaving a small
+black blot) where we touch a wafer.  The mark
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+so made is called '<i>tep-sai</i>', 'tep' meaning 'pressure'
+by touch or grip, and 'sai' meaning 'token' (I do
+not know the etymology). I ask my readers now
+to compare the '<i>tep-sai</i>' with the 'finger-print'
+alongside it, and to say whether the <i>tep-sai</i> could
+afford any means of identification by comparison
+with another blot from the same finger. Illiterates
+who can hold a pen make a cross, as we do, called
+'<i>dhera-sai</i>'; others, more ambitious, indicate their
+caste by symbols. For the interest of the thing
+I give some tracings from a collection of such caste-marks
+which I had made for this purpose when
+I was Magistrate of Midnapore in 1865.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 434px;">
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">The token-signatures of those who cannot write or read,
+in several Castes. Year 1865. Date 8 February.</span></span>
+<img src="images/i039.jpg" width="434" height="640" alt="The token-signatures." title="" />
+<p>1. Cultivator; a harrow. 2. Barber; a mirror. 3. Shop-keeper;
+scales. 4. Carpenter; a chisel. 5. A Washerman's board. 6. Female;
+a bracelet. 7. Widow; a spindle. 8. Caste uncertain; scissors. 9.
+Family Priest; an almanac roll.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+<p>When I was introducing actual registration I
+asked the principal member of my Bar to give me
+his opinion about the new marks. His answer was
+as follows (the English is of course his own):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="author">Hooghly, &nbsp; &nbsp; <br />
+The 21st Aug./77.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,</p>
+
+<p>I have examined the impressions made in these
+papers, and I think each can be distinguished from
+the others. There are also so many peculiarities in
+each impression that it cannot be forged, and I think
+it would be a preventive to forgery if all documents,
+specially by females, or males who do not know to
+read or write, would contain impressions by fingers.</p>
+
+<p class="regards">Yours faithfully,</p>
+<p class="author"><span class="smcap">Eshan Chundra Mitra</span>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I value this letter highly, for Eshan Chundra was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+Government Pleader at Hooghly, and in frequent
+request in Calcutta. No native lawyer of his large
+practice could have written thus if he had ever
+known of this method of signature before.</p>
+
+<p>Trustworthy information in my hands is to the
+effect that attestations by the finger in China are
+like Bengali <i>tep-sais</i>, and nothing more.</p>
+
+
+<h3>China.</h3>
+
+<p>The nearest approach to our use of finger-prints
+that I have found in China came to hand thus:</p>
+
+<p>An Oxford friend, Mr. Bullock, subsequently
+elected Professor of Chinese, had been interpreter
+to the Legation in Peking. Talking with him about
+the methods of signing deeds in China, he told me
+that the finger-tip (not finger-print) method was in
+ordinary use, but he was careful to point out also
+that to his knowledge ever since he went to Peking,
+about 1868, Chinese bankers had been in the habit
+of impressing their thumbs on the notes they issued;
+and he had no doubt the custom was much older
+than that. This was startling, but he kindly procured
+for me the bank-note which I here show in
+facsimile; with it came this explanation of such
+thumb-marks, given by his friend in China:</p>
+
+<p>'They are imprinted partly on the counterfoil and
+partly on the note itself, so that when presented its
+genuineness can be tested at once.'</p>
+
+<p>That is, they play the part of what is technically
+called the 'scroll' in our cheques.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 271px;">
+<img src="images/i042.jpg" width="271" height="640" alt="A CHINESE BANK NOTE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A CHINESE BANK NOTE, 1898</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>My readers may accept it that the ink used was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+the same Indian ink with which the Chinese characters
+on the note were written. That is the unhesitating
+judgement of such an expert as Mr. Galton,
+who examined it. The difference between a water
+ink and printer's ink for identification is enormous.
+Blood on the fingers has occasionally left impressions
+that fortunately sufficed to reveal the murderer; but,
+as a rule, wet fingers leave only smudges as useless
+as this one. It is quite certain, therefore, that no
+one in the habit of impressing his thumb-mark as
+this banker did, would use water ink, if he depended
+on recognizing it as his own. In short, the smudge
+on the bank-note was placed there in order to
+identify the two parts of a piece of paper after
+severance, not to prove who placed it so. My
+readers may see what exquisite delicacy of detail
+can be obtained by printer's ink, when so desired,
+if they will examine a fine skin impression with
+a magnifying-glass; even the pores along the ridges
+can be seen as white dots. For practical purposes,
+however, such extreme delicacy as this is
+not needed.</p>
+
+<p>This difference of ink suggests a further remark.
+The Chinese have used printer's ink for ages. If
+they aimed at identification they would surely have
+discovered its great value for clear impressions, and
+its use could never have died out. On the other
+hand, a method of identification depending on water
+ink could never have survived for such strict work
+as our finger-prints. On the palm of the hand
+it can give a fairly good impression for such simple
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+identification as is wanted (say) for passports, because
+the large creases will obviously be those of the
+bearer of the passport, or as obviously not. These
+lines of the palm, so well known in palmistry, are
+as clear to a man as the shape of his hand, while
+those on the pads of his own fingers are scarcely
+noticed even now by one man in a million. The
+science of identification by means of the pads
+cannot, in my opinion, date farther back than 1858,
+when I happened to use oil-ink, which was not used
+for <i>tep-sais</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The ablest defence of the claims of antiquity
+that I have seen is by a Japanese writer, Kumagusu
+Minakata, whose letter to 'Nature', Dec. 27, 1894,
+appears to be as exhaustive as it is able; but
+I hope that this paper will satisfy him that the
+finger-print system of our day has no connexion with
+the methods he describes. The 'nail-marks' of which
+he speaks must be utterly useless for identification;
+yet he treats all manner of impressions alike, and
+tells us indeed that they are all known by the one
+name of 'hand-mark'. I fear that he has failed,
+like some other writers,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> to see the definite force of
+the word 'identification' in the finger-print system.
+It means that if a man can be indicated whose finger-print
+agrees with that on a document, he is identified
+with the man who put that one there. That is all
+we want. But it will be seen that there must be two
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+impressions at least, that will bear comparison, to
+constitute 'identification'.</p>
+
+<p>None of the writers who have undertaken the
+defence appears to perceive this need of a second
+impression if the issue of identity turns on any kind
+of finger-mark. Repudiations cannot have been
+rare; tribunals must occasionally have been invoked;
+yet no instance is quoted of decision by
+demand for a second impression.</p>
+
+<p>It seems then that these marks were not made,
+as ours are, expressly to challenge comparison; that,
+in fact, they offer no points for comparison.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, it is hard to believe that a system
+so practically useful as this could have been known
+in the great lands of the East for generations past,
+without arresting the notice of Western statesmen,
+merchants, travellers, and students. Yet the knowledge
+never reached us.</p>
+
+<h4>FINIS.</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Till 1857 the East India Company's College.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892), p. 26.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See Appendix.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> I had him dismissed soon after for a different offence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> The words 'signature', 'sign-manual', 'seal', were used indifferently
+in this letter for 'finger-print'.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Clerks.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Man in charge of stationery.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Solicitors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> I include a too brief notice of the subject by Professor Giles of
+Cambridge, in his recent work 'Civilization of China', p. 118, and an
+article in the 'Nineteenth Century' of December 1904.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Origin of Finger-Printing, by William J. Herschel
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+
+Title: The Origin of Finger-Printing
+
+Author: William J. Herschel
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2011 [EBook #34859]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING ***
+
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+Produced by Eric Hutton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+
+                             THE ORIGIN OF
+                            FINGER-PRINTING
+
+                                  BY
+
+                    SIR WILLIAM J. HERSCHEL, BART.
+
+
+                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                     LONDON   EDINBURGH   GLASGOW
+                NEW YORK   TORONTO   MELBOURNE   BOMBAY
+                                 1916
+
+
+
+                          PRINTED IN ENGLAND
+                    AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+    _TO SIR EDWARD HENRY, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I._
+
+    _Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police._
+
+
+    _I am offering you this old story of the beginnings of
+    Finger-printing, by way of expressing my warm and continuous
+    admiration of those masterly developments of its original
+    applications, whereby, first in Bengal and the Transvaal, and
+    then in England, you have fashioned a weapon of penetrating
+    certainty for the sterner needs of Justice._
+
+                                               _W. J. HERSCHEL._
+      _June, 1916._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The following pages have two objects: first, to place on record the
+genesis of the Finger-print method of personal identification, from its
+discovery in Bengal in 1858, till its public demonstration there in
+1877-8; secondly, to examine the scanty suggestions of evidence that
+this use of our fingers had been foreshadowed in Europe more than a
+hundred years ago, and had indeed been general in ancient times,
+especially in China.
+
+In later years, and in energetic hands, the method has been developed
+into a system far more effective than anything I contemplated, and I do
+not go into that part of the story; but I believe these pages will
+suffice to show the originality of my study of its two essential
+features, the strict individuality and the stubborn persistence of the
+patterns on our fingers.
+
+The gift granted to me of lighting upon a discovery which promised
+escape from one great difficulty of administration in India is more than
+ever appreciated by me since I have lived to see the promise wonderfully
+fulfilled there, and in other lands as well.
+
+For the sake of interest I give, among the illustrations, several
+examples of late 'repeats' taken many years after I left India; but
+these do not belong to my story.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+  Bengalee contract with R[=a]jyadhar K[=o]n[=a]i, 1858.
+    (_Collotype_)                              _Between pages_ 8 _and_ 9
+
+  Finger-print of Dr. R. F. Hutchinson, Medical Officer at Arrah
+    Station, June 1859                                                10
+
+  Finger-print of Captain H. Raban, Chief of the Police in Lower
+    Bengal, July 29,1860                                              12
+
+  Finger-print of the Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea, April 13, 1862     13
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Charles Howard, Superintendent of Police,
+    Nuddea, April 13, 1862; and repeat, 1908                          13
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Alfred C. Lyall, 1877; and repeat, 1908         17
+
+  Finger-print of Captain A. Coleman, P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia',
+    February 1877                                                     17
+
+  Finger-prints of Bech[=a] R[=a]m D[=a]s Adhik[=a]ri,
+    (_a_) made in 1877, (_b_) made in 1892                            21
+
+  Finger-print of W. F. Courthope, 1877; and repeat, 1913             27
+
+  Finger-print of Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., 1877, aet.
+    2-3/4 years; and repeat, 1913. (_Collotype_)             _Facing_ 27
+
+  Finger-print of Colonel J. Herschel, R.E., September 22, 1877       28
+
+  Finger-print of Dr. J. F. Duthie, September 22, 1877                28
+
+  Finger-print of Sir Theodore Hope, Bo.C.S., 1877                    29
+
+  Finger-prints of William Waterfield, B.C.S., (_a_) July 31, 1860,
+    (_b_) March 31, 1877                                              29
+
+  Finger-prints of W. J. Herschel, (_a_) June 1859, (_b_) July 1859,
+    (_c_) March 31, 1877, (_d_) February 22, 1916                     30
+
+  Finger-prints, enlarged, of A. E. H. Herschel: 1881, aet. 7-3/4;
+    1890, aet. 17; 1913, aet. 40                                      31
+
+  'Thomas Bewick his mark'                                            33
+
+  A 'tep-sai' of Bengal compared with a finger-print                  35
+
+  Caste-marks of illiterates, 1865                                    36
+
+  Finger-mark on a Chinese Bank-note. (_Collotype_)          _Facing_ 38
+
+
+
+
+THE ORIGIN OF FINGER-PRINTING
+
+
+In 1858, after five years' service, as an Assistant under the old East
+India Company, in the interior of Bengal, I was in charge of my first
+subdivision, the head-quarters of which were then at Jungipoor, on the
+upper reaches of the Hooghly river. My executive and magisterial
+experience had by that time forced on me that distrust of all evidence
+tendered in Court which did so much to cloud our faith in the people
+around us. We cannot be too thankful that things have greatly improved
+in India in the last sixty years, but the time of which I am speaking
+was the very worst time of my life in this respect. I remember only too
+well writing in great despondency to one of the best and soberest-minded
+of my senior companions at Haileybury[1] about my despair of any good
+coming from orders and decisions based on such slippery facts, and the
+comfort I found in his sensible reply.
+
+  [1] Till 1857 the East India Company's College.
+
+It happened, in July of that year, that I was starting the first bit of
+road metalling at Jungipoor, and invited tenders for a supply of
+'ghooting' (a good binding material for light roads). A native named
+R[=a]jyadhar K[=o]n[=a]i, of the village of Nist[=a], came to terms with
+me, and at my desire drew up our agreement in his own hand, in true
+commercial style. He was about to sign it in the usual way, at the upper
+right-hand corner, when I stopped him in order to read it myself; and
+it then occurred to me to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his
+hand, by way of signature instead of writing. There was nothing very
+original about that, as an idea. Many must have heard of some such use
+of a man's hand; and the correspondence that has taken place has brought
+to light old instances of the hand, or the nail of a finger, or the
+teeth in one's mouth, being used to certify a man's act, or a woman's.
+But these have all been isolated instances. Sir Francis Galton, however,
+has pointed out[2] that in our own times the engraver Bewick had a fancy
+for engraving his thumb-mark, with his name attached, as vignettes, or
+as colophons, in books which he published.[3] As a boy I had loved
+Bewick on Birds: I regret that it is not now to be found in our library.
+Galton's remark has reminded me that I used to see the thumb-mark there,
+as well as I recollect, in an ornamental title-page. I mention this
+because I dare say it had something to do with my fascination over
+K[=o]n[=a]i's hand-markings. If so, the influence was unknown to me. The
+absorbing interests of manhood had blotted out, not Bewick, but his
+thumb-mark, from my memory. However that may be, I was only wishing to
+frighten K[=o]n[=a]i out of all thought of repudiating his signature
+hereafter. He, of course, had never dreamt of such an attestation, but
+fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm and fingers over with the
+home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole
+hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a
+good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on
+another impression. Here is a facsimile of the whole document, made by
+the Clarendon Press. I was so pleased with the experiment that, having
+to make a second contract with K[=o]n[=a]i, I made him attest it in the
+same way. One of these contracts I gave to Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton
+for his celebrated paper read before the Royal Society, November 1890,
+to which body he presented it; the other lies before me now. Trials with
+my own fingers soon showed the advantage of using them instead of the
+whole hand for the purpose then in view, i.e. for securing a signature
+which the writer would obviously hesitate to disown. That he might be
+infallibly convicted of perjury, if he did, is a very different matter.
+That was not settled, and could not have been settled, to the
+satisfaction of Courts of Justice, till, after many years, abundant
+agreement had been reached among ordinary people. The very possibility
+of such a 'sanction' (to use a technical expression) to the use of a
+finger-print did not dawn upon me till after long experience, and even
+then it became no more than a personal conviction for many years more.
+The decisiveness of a finger-print is now one of the most powerful aids
+to Justice. Our possession of it derives from the impression of
+K[=o]n[=a]i's hand in 1858.
+
+  [2] 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892), p. 26.
+
+  [3] See Appendix.
+
+Of trials with my own fingers the oldest impression I possess was taken
+in June 1859, when I first began to keep records. I had been transferred
+to be Magistrate of Arrah, the most north-westerly district of Bengal,
+where the Mutiny still left work to do which allowed little time for
+private hobbies; but I took so many prints among the society of the
+Station, as well as among Indians of all classes, that my 'fad' about
+them was well known. The Medical Officer of Arrah was Dr. R. F.
+Hutchinson, who naturally took great interest in the subject. Twenty-one
+years later, in 1880, he was still there, and sent me a 'repeat' print
+of his fingers. Here is a facsimile of his first Arrah impression. In
+1890, being in England, he visited Galton's Laboratory, and gave a
+second repeat (after thirty-one years) which was used in 'Finger-prints'
+(1892), p. 93, to support Mr. Galton's evidence of 'Persistency'. In the
+facsimile 'Collection 1858-1913', which I am attaching to some of the
+copies of this narrative, will be found other prints which I took at
+Arrah of my whole hand and of my right foot. They agree irresistibly
+with prints taken now after an interval of fifty-seven years.
+
+    [Illustration: KONAI'S HAND Bengal 1858]
+
+    [Illustration: Contract for 2,000 maunds of road-metalling,
+    between W. J. Herschel and Rajyadhar Konai, in Konai's
+    handwriting]
+
+In 1860 I was sent as Magistrate to Nuddea, nearer to Calcutta. The
+Indigo disturbances in the district had given rise to a great deal of
+violence, litigation, and fraud; forgery and perjury were rampant. The
+rent-rolls of the ryots put into Court by the Zemindars; the pottahs
+(agreements for rent) purporting to be issued by them to each ryot, put
+in by the latter; the kabooliyats (acceptances) purporting to be signed
+by the ryot, and tendered in evidence against him; all these documents
+were frequently worth no more than the paper on which they were written.
+In my own jail a notorious convict was found making clay seals of
+well-known landlords, and forging their signatures on pottahs smuggled
+into his hands. He was detected by the colour of the floor of his cell,
+where he kept his stock-in-trade buried. Things were so bad in this and
+other ways that the administration of Civil Justice had unusual
+difficulty in preserving its dignity. I was driven to take up
+finger-prints now with a definite object before me, and for three years
+continued taking a very large number from all sorts and conditions of
+men. I give here some selected impressions of friends taken in Nuddea
+during the years 1860, 1861, and 1862, in order of date, and names of
+some others.
+
+    [Illustration: R. F. Hutchinson, June 1859, Medical Officer at
+    Arrah Station.]
+
+1860, July. Claude Brown, a prominent merchant of Calcutta, who was
+making a tour in the Indigo districts, and was at the time my guest.
+
+1860, July 29. Captain H. Raban, Head of the Bengal Police, sent to
+Nuddea on account of its disturbed state; also my guest. He took extreme
+interest in the evidence of his own imprint. It was my habit, of course,
+to give duplicates of his 'mark' to every one of importance.
+
+    [Illustration: Captain H. Raban, Head of the Police in Lower
+    Bengal, July 29, 1860.]
+
+1860, July 31. W. Waterfield, B.C.S., a college friend, afterwards
+Comptroller-General of the Treasuries of India. I have several 'repeats'
+of his; see especially p. 29.
+
+1861, June 24. Ogilvie Temple, Judge of the Court of Small Causes,
+Kooshtea.
+
+1862, April 13. At a gathering at my house at Kishnagar I had the good
+fortune to secure the prints of many other notables of the district.
+
+The Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea. He was the highest of the old nobility
+of Bengal. He was much struck, as I was, by the remarkable symmetry of
+the 'pattern' on one of his fingers at the core.
+
+    [Illustration:
+    April 13, 1862. Mah[=a]r[=a]j[=a] of Nuddea.
+    Enlarged for the remarkable pattern]
+
+    [Illustration:
+    April 13, 1862. A. C. Howard.
+    July 20, 1908. Sir Charles Howard.]
+
+Same day. E. Grey, B.C.S. A college friend, on my staff, afterwards
+Civil and Sessions Judge. He, I am happy to say, is still alive (1916),
+and his 'repeat' is quite good now.
+
+Same day. A. C. Howard, District Superintendent of Police, Nuddea,
+afterwards Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and knighted for his
+services there, as Sir Charles Howard. He gladly gave me a 'repeat' in
+London after forty-six years. It will be seen how good the persistence
+has been.
+
+Same day. Three other Assistant Magistrates on the unusually large staff
+of the district. Among these was F. K. Hewitt, B.C.S., afterwards
+Commissioner of Chota Nagpur. Twenty-six years later, at my request, he
+furnished Sir Francis Galton with the 'repeat' printed on p. 93 of his
+famous work 'Finger-prints' (Macmillan, 1892). I have much later repeats
+taken at Oxford.
+
+Same day. Ninian H. Thomson, Judge of the Court of Small Causes. He
+kindly sent me a repeat twenty-eight years later from Florence, and this
+also appears in the same work, p. 93.
+
+Very early in my experiments I entertained misgivings about the
+possibility of the impressions being forged by the professional
+criminals whom we had so much reason to fear. I therefore submitted some
+specimens to the best artists in Calcutta to imitate. Their failure
+sufficed to dispel all anxiety on that point. None of them come near
+Bewick's engravings in accuracy.
+
+Before I left Kishnagar (Nuddea) the violence of the Indigo disturbances
+had been subdued, but the Courts became choked with suits for
+enhancement of rent upon the recalcitrant cultivators, and the sore
+point about the genuineness of leases, &c., became aggravated. I took
+courage from despair, and in my judicial capacity (if I remember right)
+addressed an official letter to the Government of Bengal, definitely
+advocating administrative action to enforce the use of 'finger-prints'
+by both parties as necessary to the validity of these documents.
+Unfortunately I kept no private draft of this letter, and have lost the
+date, probably 1862 or 1863. It must, however, be on record, both in
+Nuddea and in the Calcutta Secretariat. Nothing came of it, and I took
+no more pains about it. But a few years ago I was pleasantly reminded by
+Mr. Horace Cockerell, for some time Secretary to the Government, who
+gave me the history of its reception, viz. that it had been deemed
+inadvisable, when things were quieting down, to raise a new controversy
+of the sort. He added that it was a matter of regret now, that no action
+whatever had been taken, but he pointed out that legislation would have
+been necessary to make the new marks admissible in evidence, and to get
+such a law on the spur of the moment would have been hopeless. That
+difficulty had certainly never occurred to me when I made the
+suggestion. But how weighty an objection it was is shown by the fact
+that it was long, even after the value of finger-prints had been
+established in practice, before the High Court of Calcutta, in a leading
+case, declared that the evidence could not be excluded, nay more, that
+it was cogent. This was many years before such a case in England. At the
+time I wrote it is quite certain that no Court in India, no pleader, no
+solicitor had ever recognized such signatures as these.
+
+In 1863 I took my first furlough to England, which changed the current
+of my thoughts. But I found that my own people had been more interested
+than I had supposed by my correspondence on the subject. Among my
+brother Alexander's papers was found after his death a letter telling
+him my ideas, and asking him to devise a roller of some sort, for
+oil-ink, better than my soft office pads.
+
+During that and later furloughs I took no public steps about the
+subject. In society, of course, it was looked on simply as a hobby,
+attracting no more serious attention than did Bewick's fancy for
+engraving his thumb-mark in his day. But the warm interest shown by my
+own people, who had known my early troubles in India, determined me,
+during my last furlough, that before completing my service I would give
+the thing an open official trial on my own responsibility. I sailed,
+1877, in the P. and O. steamer 'Mongolia', Captain Coleman, with my
+sister, now Mrs. Maclear, who was an enthusiast on my side. We roused
+attention enough on board in the Indian Ocean to obtain the
+finger-prints of the Captain and many of his officers, stewards, and
+kal[=a]shis; also of many of the passengers, among whom I may especially
+mention Sir Alfred and Lady Lyall (as they afterwards became), Colonel
+Garrow Waterfield, and Colonel Chermside. Some thirty years later, 1908,
+Sir A. Lyall permitted me to take and use his repeat impression. Here
+are facsimiles of both, and also of Captain Coleman's, the pattern of
+which was thought then to deserve enlargement. Friendship, which for
+family reasons sprang up between Colonel Garrow Waterfield and myself,
+led him to take special interest in my project, and I cannot doubt that
+he carried that with him to the Punjab, where his reputation was high.
+Most of the other saloon passengers were business men on their way back
+to the Far East, and left us at Ceylon. If any one of them had heard of
+the use of these marks, say in China, I could not but have been told of
+it. But there was not a breath of the sort. I give here a list of the
+remaining signatures still in my possession, in case any may meet with
+recognition: F. Slight, Officer of the 'Mongolia', F. A. Owen, J.
+Watson, R. Hawkins, F. Wingrove, O. Westphal, J. W. Malet, G. S. Lynch,
+Mrs. Philip. It is only reasonable, I think, to believe that such a
+novel and evidently useful idea would have spread by their means
+wherever they went. My exhibition was frequently asked for, and I always
+gave a duplicate of his mark to each person, and sometimes added one of
+my own to show the extraordinary persistence of patterns after nigh
+twenty years.
+
+    [Illustration:
+    Sir A. C. Lyall. 1877.
+    Sir Alfred C. Lyall, May 15, 1908.]
+
+    [Illustration:
+    Capt. A. Coleman (P. & O. SS. 'Mongolia'), February, 1877.
+    Enlargements by eye.]
+
+On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at
+Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal
+courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration
+of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government
+pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires,
+but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile
+the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a
+little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for
+their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near
+Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such
+difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it
+well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful,
+therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the
+impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink
+made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which
+were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments.
+
+The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made
+the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it
+unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'.
+No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates
+for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated
+by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the
+genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures,
+whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women
+mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink
+from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and
+under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the
+sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the
+executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his
+intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was
+never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent
+attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied;
+personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to
+swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at
+Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered
+there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual
+executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years
+afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print
+before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence
+on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers,
+hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that
+he was _not_ the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High
+Court rejected the sworn story of an accident, and confirmed the facts
+of the registration, with the necessary consequence to the offender for
+his perjury. I do not know of any other repudiation having been pressed
+to this bitter end in India or elsewhere. The contrast between the
+inherent weakness of the old law and the efficiency of the new test
+could not be better exemplified. This case gave the first stern blow to
+the foul mischief that had developed such cruel proportions in India
+under cover of our conservative legal habits.
+
+The way the new safeguard was applied at Hooghly in 1877 was
+thus:--After the legal formalities of registration had been observed,
+the Registrar made the person print his two fingers on the deed, and
+again in a diary book which was kept by him in the office, for my own
+inspection rather than as evidence. It is, no doubt, preserved at
+Hooghly still.
+
+It was from this book that cuttings were made at my request in 1892 by
+Mr. Duke, the magistrate, which formed the subject of Sir Francis
+Galton's volume on 'Blurred Finger-prints' (1893), to which, for its
+cogency in marshalling the evidence, I must refer my readers. I annex a
+tracing of one of his enlargements, by permission of the London
+University, to which he left his great collection.
+
+    [Illustration: Bech[=a] R[=a]m D[=a]s Adhik[=a]ri. From tracings
+    by Mr. Galton of enlargements,
+      (_a_) Made in 1877 when registering his deed;
+      (_b_) made in 1892 for Mr. Galton.]
+
+Another form in which I made use of the new system for public purposes
+was in the jail. The common device of hiring a substitute to serve out a
+term was not unknown, but it involved a long risk of detection. A safer
+but very costly, and therefore rare, device was sham death and a
+purchased corpse, affording comparative safety after escape. A case of
+this kind, carried out with the aid of an irregularly appointed doctor,
+was strongly suspected by me at Hooghly.[4] The precaution I adopted
+was to take the finger-prints of each offender when passing sentence of
+imprisonment, both on the records of the Court and also on the warrant
+to the jailer.
+
+  [4] I had him dismissed soon after for a different offence.
+
+All these processes were in full use when I left India, on the
+completion of twenty-five years' service, in 1878. I was by that time
+almost broken down in health, and more so in energy. Sir Ashley Eden,
+the Lieutenant-Governor, offered me a substantive Commissionership. I
+had already held such an appointment twice, and nothing but an honest
+sense of inability made me decline it now. I mention this in explanation
+of the slackness on my part, but for which the finger-print system would
+certainly have been put in force in the Registration Department, at
+least throughout Bengal, forty years ago. As it was, I only tried to
+induce the Inspector of Jails and the Registrar-General of the day to
+give the system a trial. Fortunately I kept an office copy of this
+letter, which, in reply to outside criticism, I published in 'Nature',
+Nov. 22, 1894, and repeat here to complete this narrative.
+
+
+(TRUE COPY OF OFFICE COPY.)
+
+                                     HOOGHLY, _August 15, 1877_.
+
+    MY DEAR B----, --I enclose a paper which looks unusual,
+    but which I hope has some value. It exhibits a method of
+    identification of persons, which, with ordinary care in
+    execution, and with judicial care in the scrutiny, is, I can
+    now say, for all practical purposes far more infallible than
+    photography. It consists in taking a seal-like impression,
+    in common seal ink, of the markings on the skin of the two
+    forefingers of the right hand (these two being taken for
+    convenience only).
+
+    I am able to say that these marks do not (bar accidents) change
+    in the course of ten or fifteen years so much as to affect the
+    utility of the test.
+
+    The process of taking the impression is hardly more difficult
+    than that of making a fair stamp of an office seal. I have been
+    trying it in the Jail and in the Registering Office and among
+    pensioners here for some months past. I have purposely taken no
+    particular pains in explaining the process, beyond once showing
+    how it is done, and once or twice visiting the office,
+    inspecting the signatures,[5] and asking the _omlah_[6] to be
+    a little more careful. The articles necessary are such as the
+    _daftari_[7] can prepare on a mere verbal explanation.
+
+    Every person who now registers a document at Hooghly has to sign
+    his 'sign-manual'. None has offered the smallest objection, and
+    I believe that the practice, if generally adopted, will put an
+    end to all attempts at personation.
+
+    The cogency of the evidence is admitted by every one who takes
+    the trouble to compare a few signatures together, and to try
+    making a few himself. I have taken thousands now in the course
+    of the last twenty years, and (bar smudges and accidents, which
+    are rarely bad enough to be fatal) I am prepared to answer for
+    the identity of every person whose 'sign-manual' I can now
+    produce if I am confronted with him.
+
+    As an instance of the value of the thing, I might suggest that
+    if Roger Tichborne had given his 'sign-manual' on entering the
+    Army on any register, the whole Orton case would have been
+    knocked on the head in ten minutes by requiring Orton to make
+    his sign-manual alongside it for comparison.
+
+    I send this specimen to you because I believe that
+    identification is by no means the unnecessary thing in jails
+    which one might presume it should be. I don't think I need
+    dilate on that point. Here is the means of verifying the
+    identity of every man in jail with the man sentenced by the
+    court, at any moment, day or night. Call the number up and make
+    him sign. If it is he, it is he; if not, he is exposed on the
+    spot. Is No. 1302 really dead, and is that his corpse or a sham
+    one? The corpse has two fingers that will answer the question
+    at once. Is this man brought into jail the real Simon Pure
+    sentenced by the magistrate? The sign-manual on the back of the
+    magistrate's warrant is there to testify, &c.
+
+    For uses in other departments and transactions, especially among
+    illiterate people, it is available with such ease that I quite
+    think its general use would be a substantial contribution
+    towards public morality. Now that it is pretty well known
+    here, I do not believe the man lives who would dare to attempt
+    personation before the Registrar here. The mukhtears[8] all
+    know the potency of the evidence too well.
+
+    Will you kindly give the matter a little patient attention, and
+    then let me ask whether you would let me try it in other jails?
+
+    The impressions will, I doubt not, explain themselves to
+    you without more words. I will say that perhaps in a small
+    proportion of the cases that might come to question the study
+    of the seals by an expert might be advisable, but that in most
+    cases any man of judgement giving his attention to it cannot
+    fail to pronounce right. I have never seen any two signatures
+    about which I remained in doubt after sufficient care.
+
+    Kindly keep the specimens carefully.
+
+                                        Yours sincerely,
+                                                    W. HERSCHEL.
+
+  [5] The words 'signature', 'sign-manual', 'seal', were used
+      indifferently in this letter for 'finger-print'.
+
+  [6] Clerks.
+
+  [7] Man in charge of stationery.
+
+  [8] Solicitors.
+
+I received one answer, but its tenor was not so encouraging as I had
+hoped. I was out of heart, and did not press my request.
+
+How much all this was regretted afterwards by others I must in simple
+justice record. It came about so quietly and so honourably that it is
+only now that I feel myself free to say publicly how deeply I was
+touched. My first substantive Commissionership had been given me by Sir
+George Campbell, to whose house I was not long after brought back in a
+dying condition from malarial fever. Sir George and his private
+secretary, Mr. Luttman Johnson, took us, my wife and myself, into the
+tenderest care. Years afterwards, in 1906, the latter befriended me in
+the kindliest manner at the annual I.C.S. garden-party, which I but
+rarely attended, and invited me to dine with him that evening. It was a
+party of seven or eight, and the next to arrive were Sir James and Lady
+Bourdillon. His name, when our host introduced us, I only recognized as
+lately Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. To my great surprise,
+before our hands parted, he told me how often he had wished to meet me,
+to express his constant regret at having let my suggestion slip through
+his hands when he was Registrar-General. He remembered my letter well,
+and had indeed taken action by inquiry concerning my doings in his
+department, but for some reason he had lost sight of the matter.
+Needless to say, we became the firmest of friends on the spot, and I had
+the pleasure of a visit from him afterwards at Oxford. It is some years
+now since he and Mr. Luttman Johnson died. None of us, as far as I know,
+has ever spoken of this fine act of Sir James's except in strict
+privacy.
+
+The Inspector of Jails of 1877, Mr. Beverley, afterwards a judge in the
+High Court of Bengal, is still alive. Writing in 1906, he says,
+regretfully, 'I have no recollection of writing the letter you refer to,
+but I know that, both as Registrar-General and as Inspector of Jails, I
+took great interest in the Finger-print system of identification, of
+which I always regarded you as the Apostle in India'. He too came to see
+me at Oxford after that, with one of his successors in the High Court.
+
+I shall say more farther on in regard to my statement in this 1877
+letter that 'these marks do not change in the course of ten or fifteen
+years'.
+
+During my stay at Hooghly, so near Calcutta, I saw more society in my
+own house than in other stations, and interested my friends with the
+novelty of finger-printing. I give a few of their names to which special
+interest attaches.
+
+Among Indian gentlemen, whose prints were taken at Hooghly in 1877, I do
+not know who are still living; I can only give the names of
+
+  (1) B[=a]bu Dinon[=a]th P[=a]l, of Hooghly;
+  (2) B[=a]bu Lalit Mohun Singh, of Sibpur;
+  (3) B[=a]bu Upendra N[=a]r[=a]yan Nandi, of Sh[=a]h[=a]ganj.
+
+Of English friends still living I am allowed to reproduce the print of
+1877, and its repeat in 1913, of Mr. Frank Courthope, well known in
+Sussex and in banking circles in London, (next page).
+
+The next is remarkable. Captain V. H. Haggard, R.N., was a child of
+2-3/4 years old at Hooghly, 1877. By much ingratiation I succeeded in
+getting a print of his whole hand, and another of three fingers. In
+1913, when on special duty in H.M.S. 'President', he kindly gave me (not
+for the first time) a repeat, this time at the age of 38. The baby print
+bears enlargement beautifully, and I am sure my readers will be
+delighted with the comparison I am thus able to lay before them.
+
+    [Illustration: CAPTAIN V. H. HAGGARD, R. N.
+      1877 aet. 2-3/4
+      r. 3 1877 (magnified)
+      Repeat 1913 (magnified)]
+
+    [Illustration: W. F. Courthope.
+      r. 1 At Hooghly, 1877.
+      r. 1 r. 2 Oct. 21, 1913.
+      r. 2 At Hooghly, 1877.]
+
+One of the prints I value most, on personal grounds, is that of Sir
+Theodore Hope, at that time in the Legislative Council of India for
+Bombay. I grieve to say he has died since these words were written. He
+was one of my most honoured college friends in the old Haileybury days
+of 1853.
+
+Among the last prints that I took in India were two at Mussoorie, in the
+Punjab Him[=a]layas, in Sept. 1877; one of my brother Colonel J.
+Herschel, R.E., and one of Dr. J. F. Duthie, of the Forest Department.
+They are both living still, and their repeats to-day are quite good.
+
+To return now to my letter of 1877. I was 'able to say that these marks
+do not change in the course of ten or fifteen years'. I might have said
+eighteen years, for my own marks reached back to 1859; but I was
+steering for safety.
+
+The conviction of the unchanging character of finger-patterns had,
+of course, grown on me only by degrees, as the evidence of time
+accumulated. Among my friends, from Nuddea days onwards, I often took
+second impressions, invariably drawing attention to their identity with
+the former ones. I never came upon any sign of change, bar accident. But
+such comparisons were generally limited to intervals of no more than two
+or three years, owing to the frequent changes of residence incidental to
+Indian service. As time went on it was chiefly the incessant evidence of
+my own ten fingers, and of my whole hand, which wrought in me the
+overwhelming conviction that the lines on the skin persisted
+indefinitely.
+
+    [Illustration: Colonel J. Herschel, Sept. 22, 1877.]
+
+    [Illustration: J. F. Duthie, 1877.]
+
+But besides my own evidence of eighteen years, I had that of my oldest
+college friend, William Waterfield, of almost as long. On March 31,
+1877, he and Mr. (afterwards Sir Theodore) Hope and Mrs. Hope were my
+guests at Hooghly. I took all their impressions and my own on that day,
+noting on Waterfield's that we compared it with his earliest print of
+1860, in Nuddea, seventeen years earlier. We found the agreement, of
+course, complete. Here are the facsimiles.
+
+    [Illustration: T. C. Hope, Bo.C.S., at Hooghly, 1877.]
+
+    [Illustration: W. Waterfield
+      July 31, 1860, Nuddea.
+      March 31, 1877, Hooghly.]
+
+If more evidence were required, I was prepared, without hesitation,
+to call on any person whose mark I had taken since I began. It was in
+fact from among those very persons, Natives as well as English, that
+thirteen years later, at Mr. Galton's request, I obtained the repeats
+which, by their much longer persistence then, went so far to prove his
+case to universal conviction.
+
+I close this record with a comparison between three of my own prints,
+taken, one in 1859, one in 1877, and the last to-day, after fifty-seven
+years. For length of persistence they cannot at present be matched.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      (_a_) (_b_) W. J. H., 1859, Arrah (aet. 26).
+      (_c_) W. J. H., March 31, 1877 (aet. 44).
+      (_d_) W. J. H., February 22, 1916 (aet. 83).]
+
+It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative, but I cannot refrain
+from offering my readers here a striking instance of the almost
+incredible persistency of atomic renovation that takes place in the pads
+of our fingers, in spite of their being more subject to wear than any
+other part of the body. The first was taken at the age of 7-3/4; the
+next, for Mr. Galton, nine years later. In 1913 my son was in Canada
+when I asked him to send me several repeats. Every print showed the
+minute tell-tale dot which Mr. Galton's sharp eye had noticed twenty-two
+years before. No doubt it was a natal mark. It has anyhow already
+persisted for thirty-two years.
+
+    [Illustration: A. E. H. Herschel, r. 3.
+      1881, aet. 7-3/4.
+      1890, aet. 17.
+      1913, aet. 40.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+When I speak of the 'discovery' of finger-prints nigh sixty years ago, I
+should wish to be understood correctly. I cannot say that I thought of
+it as such until Mr. Galton examined old records in search of earlier
+notices of the subject. What he found had been beyond my ken, and I
+never inquired for myself. The fascination of experiments and the
+impelling object of them were all I cared about. Had it been otherwise I
+should have had an open field for egoism to any extent, for no one
+questioned the novelty of the thing.
+
+The time that has elapsed since Galton's inquiries, without any material
+addition to his ascertained facts, justifies me, I venture to think, in
+speaking of my work as the 'discovery' of the value of finger-prints.
+
+I proceed to show what has been brought to light from other sources.
+
+
+Bewick.
+
+Of modern cases the first known is that of Thomas Bewick. He was a
+wood-engraver, as well as an author, and had a fancy for engraving his
+finger-mark. He printed, as far as I can ascertain, only three
+specimens, by way of ornament to his books.
+
+1. 1809. 'British Birds', p. 190. The impression of the finger appears
+as if obliterating a small scene of a cottage, trees, and a rider, but
+the paper between the lines of the finger is almost all clean.
+
+2. 1818. The 'Receipt'; of which, by Mr. Quaritch's favour, I possess
+one. This is, beyond all possibility of doubt, quite free from any
+tooling. How it was transferred to paper in those days (of which there
+is an indication) I am unable to say, but for his purposes it was an
+original 'finger-print' of Thomas Bewick. Even the fine half-tone
+process of this facsimile cannot reproduce its delicacy.
+
+    [Illustration: Thomas Bewick his mark]
+
+3. 1826. Memorial Edition of Bewick's Works, 1885, on the last page of
+the last volume, under a letter dated 1826, in which he rates some one
+for copying his woodcuts. When I saw it at the British Museum some years
+ago I thought it showed toolwork.
+
+These three seem to be all the specimens now available, and they are
+from three different fingers, of which two are certified to be his own.
+
+Gathering that Mr. Quaritch was exceptionally familiar with Bewick's
+life, I told him that I wished to leave no stone unturned to do ample
+justice to him, if he was known to have done anything more than appears
+above. Mr. Quaritch took the matter up very kindly, and finally informed
+me that he had been unable to trace any writing of Bewick's concerning
+these prints. There seems, therefore, no evidence that he ever took
+impressions of any finger but his own. Now it is true that no one of
+observant habits, and least of all an engraver, could fail to perceive
+the peculiarities of his own finger. The brick-makers of Babylon and
+Egypt, and every printer since fingers were dirtied by printer's ink,
+must have noticed them. But it is a long step from that to a study of
+other men's marks, with a view to identification. What Bewick certainly
+did do might easily have led him to such a study, but it looks as if he
+was satisfied with recognizing his own mark.
+
+Remembering, as I have already said, how one of his marks had struck my
+fancy as a boy, I am disposed to believe that, all unwittingly, I was
+guided to seize upon a thread which Bewick had let fall.
+
+
+Purkinje.
+
+Five years after Bewick, Johannes Purkinje, of Breslau, in 1823, read an
+essay which has been found and examined by Mr. Galton, and partly
+translated on p. 85 of his 1892 work. Purkinje carried his study of the
+patterns on fingers beyond all comparison with Bewick's use of them, of
+whose existence indeed he could hardly have been aware. He worked hard
+on them for a scientific (medical) purpose. It seemed to me strange
+that, going so far as he did, he had not hit upon our idea. To satisfy
+myself I read his work through in 1909. The very last sentence in it
+seemed to strike a light. Referring to 'the varieties of the tonsils,
+and especially of the papillae of the tongue, in different individuals'
+(no mention of fingers), he finishes the sentence and his essay by
+saying: 'from all which [varieties] sound materials will be furnished
+for that individual knowledge of the man which is of no less importance
+than a general knowledge of him is, especially in the practice of
+medicine.' A fine conclusion indeed, and a stimulating; but no part of
+his essay conveys an inkling of identification by means of any of the
+individual varieties on which he always lays stress, not even his
+pioneer work in the classification of the markings on fingers.
+
+    [Illustration: A _tep-sai_ of Bengal.]
+
+    [Illustration: A finger-print.]
+
+    [Illustration: THE TOKEN-SIGNATURES OF THOSE WHO CANNOT WRITE OR
+    READ, IN SEVERAL CASTES. YEAR 1865. DATE 8 FEBRUARY.
+
+    1. Cultivator; a harrow. 2. Barber; a mirror. 3. Shop-keeper;
+    scales. 4. Carpenter; a chisel. 5. A Washerman's board. 6.
+    Female; a bracelet. 7. Widow; a spindle. 8. Caste uncertain;
+    scissors. 9. Family Priest; an almanac roll.]
+
+
+Bengal.
+
+The common way for illiterates to sign is to wet the tip of one finger
+with ink from a pen, and then touch the document (leaving a small black
+blot) where we touch a wafer. The mark so made is called '_tep-sai_',
+'tep' meaning 'pressure' by touch or grip, and 'sai' meaning 'token'
+(I do not know the etymology). I ask my readers now to compare the
+'_tep-sai_' with the 'finger-print' alongside it, and to say whether the
+_tep-sai_ could afford any means of identification by comparison with
+another blot from the same finger. Illiterates who can hold a pen make a
+cross, as we do, called '_dhera-sai_'; others, more ambitious, indicate
+their caste by symbols. For the interest of the thing I give some
+tracings from a collection of such caste-marks which I had made for this
+purpose when I was Magistrate of Midnapore in 1865.
+
+When I was introducing actual registration I asked the principal member
+of my Bar to give me his opinion about the new marks. His answer was as
+follows (the English is of course his own):
+
+                                                      Hooghly,
+                                                  The 21st Aug./77.
+
+    DEAR SIR,
+
+    I have examined the impressions made in these papers, and I
+    think each can be distinguished from the others. There are also
+    so many peculiarities in each impression that it cannot be
+    forged, and I think it would be a preventive to forgery if all
+    documents, specially by females, or males who do not know to
+    read or write, would contain impressions by fingers.
+
+                                          Yours faithfully,
+                                                ESHAN CHUNDRA MITRA.
+
+I value this letter highly, for Eshan Chundra was Government Pleader at
+Hooghly, and in frequent request in Calcutta. No native lawyer of his
+large practice could have written thus if he had ever known of this
+method of signature before.
+
+Trustworthy information in my hands is to the effect that attestations
+by the finger in China are like Bengali _tep-sais_, and nothing more.
+
+
+China.
+
+The nearest approach to our use of finger-prints that I have found in
+China came to hand thus:
+
+An Oxford friend, Mr. Bullock, subsequently elected Professor of
+Chinese, had been interpreter to the Legation in Peking. Talking with
+him about the methods of signing deeds in China, he told me that the
+finger-tip (not finger-print) method was in ordinary use, but he was
+careful to point out also that to his knowledge ever since he went to
+Peking, about 1868, Chinese bankers had been in the habit of impressing
+their thumbs on the notes they issued; and he had no doubt the custom
+was much older than that. This was startling, but he kindly procured for
+me the bank-note which I here show in facsimile; with it came this
+explanation of such thumb-marks, given by his friend in China:
+
+'They are imprinted partly on the counterfoil and partly on the note
+itself, so that when presented its genuineness can be tested at once.'
+
+That is, they play the part of what is technically called the 'scroll'
+in our cheques.
+
+    [Illustration: A CHINESE BANK NOTE, 1898]
+
+My readers may accept it that the ink used was the same Indian ink with
+which the Chinese characters on the note were written. That is the
+unhesitating judgement of such an expert as Mr. Galton, who examined it.
+The difference between a water ink and printer's ink for identification
+is enormous. Blood on the fingers has occasionally left impressions that
+fortunately sufficed to reveal the murderer; but, as a rule, wet fingers
+leave only smudges as useless as this one. It is quite certain,
+therefore, that no one in the habit of impressing his thumb-mark as this
+banker did, would use water ink, if he depended on recognizing it as his
+own. In short, the smudge on the bank-note was placed there in order to
+identify the two parts of a piece of paper after severance, not to prove
+who placed it so. My readers may see what exquisite delicacy of detail
+can be obtained by printer's ink, when so desired, if they will examine
+a fine skin impression with a magnifying-glass; even the pores along the
+ridges can be seen as white dots. For practical purposes, however, such
+extreme delicacy as this is not needed.
+
+This difference of ink suggests a further remark. The Chinese have used
+printer's ink for ages. If they aimed at identification they would
+surely have discovered its great value for clear impressions, and its
+use could never have died out. On the other hand, a method of
+identification depending on water ink could never have survived for such
+strict work as our finger-prints. On the palm of the hand it can give a
+fairly good impression for such simple identification as is wanted
+(say) for passports, because the large creases will obviously be those
+of the bearer of the passport, or as obviously not. These lines of the
+palm, so well known in palmistry, are as clear to a man as the shape of
+his hand, while those on the pads of his own fingers are scarcely
+noticed even now by one man in a million. The science of identification
+by means of the pads cannot, in my opinion, date farther back than 1858,
+when I happened to use oil-ink, which was not used for _tep-sais_.
+
+The ablest defence of the claims of antiquity that I have seen is by a
+Japanese writer, Kumagusu Minakata, whose letter to 'Nature', Dec. 27,
+1894, appears to be as exhaustive as it is able; but I hope that this
+paper will satisfy him that the finger-print system of our day has no
+connexion with the methods he describes. The 'nail-marks' of which he
+speaks must be utterly useless for identification; yet he treats all
+manner of impressions alike, and tells us indeed that they are all known
+by the one name of 'hand-mark'. I fear that he has failed, like some
+other writers,[9] to see the definite force of the word 'identification'
+in the finger-print system. It means that if a man can be indicated
+whose finger-print agrees with that on a document, he is identified with
+the man who put that one there. That is all we want. But it will be seen
+that there must be two impressions at least, that will bear comparison,
+to constitute 'identification'.
+
+  [9] I include a too brief notice of the subject by Professor Giles
+      of Cambridge, in his recent work 'Civilization of China', p. 118,
+      and an article in the 'Nineteenth Century' of December 1904.
+
+None of the writers who have undertaken the defence appears to perceive
+this need of a second impression if the issue of identity turns on any
+kind of finger-mark. Repudiations cannot have been rare; tribunals must
+occasionally have been invoked; yet no instance is quoted of decision by
+demand for a second impression.
+
+It seems then that these marks were not made, as ours are, expressly to
+challenge comparison; that, in fact, they offer no points for
+comparison.
+
+In conclusion, it is hard to believe that a system so practically useful
+as this could have been known in the great lands of the East for
+generations past, without arresting the notice of Western statesmen,
+merchants, travellers, and students. Yet the knowledge never reached us.
+
+
+                                FINIS.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Origin of Finger-Printing, by 
+William J. Herschel
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