FINGER-PHINTS

as a means of {dent if i cation, were first called attention to in 1823 by Purkinje, the eminent physiologist of Breslau. The first practical application of the method was made in the Hooghly district of Bengal by Sir Wiliam Herschel, who wrcte a report recommending its gencral adoption in India. Sir Francis Galton subsequently took up the subject of finger-prints—or dactylography—as a study, and found that the innumerable ricge-patterns and characteristics noticeable on the ball of the thumb and fingers are not alike in any two persons, and persist during the whole period of human life, and that thus an accurate means of identification is afforded by simply inking the under surface of the hand and taking an impre ion on paper. A British Home Office committee reported in 1894 in favour of the use ef the finger-print system in conjunction with M. Bertillon’s anthropometric cla ification (as is now the practice of many foreign Governments); while identification experiments in Bengal, by means of fingerprints only, proved so succe ful that in 1897 the Government of India appointed a committee to examine both systems. This committee recommended the adoption of fingerprints on the Bengal plan as being superior to the anthropometric method both in simplicity of working and apparatus, and in the rapidity and certainty of its results. Since 1897 this recommendation has been gradually carried into effect throughout India, where the use of the fingerprint system now extends to various branches of public busine . The system is also in use throughout Great Britain, and there is a special department for finger-print records at Scotland Yard. Identification by this means, however, ought to be entrusted to experts or properly trained persons, and not put in the power of unskilled persons.—Cf. Sir W. Herschel, Origin of Finger-priniing.