FRANCIS G ALTON 181 



insanity, gregarious and slavish instincts, mental imagery, number 

 forms and color associations, only one may be noticed in further detail. 

 This is a study of the sensitiveness of blind and seeing, savage and 

 civilized individuals. As a result of his personal experience in bar- 

 barous and cultured lands, he concludes that savages have no keener 

 senses than civilized man ; and as a result of his experiments in schools 

 for the blind he finds that the popular belief that in senses other than 

 sight the blind are more sensitive than normal individuals has no foun- 

 dation in fact. 



After a lapse of six years " Natural Inheritance " was given to the 

 public. 



Mr. Galton came to be interested in finger prints in 1888, in con- 

 nection with preparations for a lecture on personal identification and 

 description. Having some misgivings concerning the adequacy of M. 

 Bertillon's system of identification by measurement — because physical 

 characters are not independent, but correlated — he cast about for other 

 possible means, and undertook the investigation of finger prints. 



Fortunately, Sir William Herschel who had actually used finger 

 prints as a means of identification while commissioner in India learned 

 of Mr. Galton's work and came to his aid with valuable prints and 

 suggestions. 



Identification by means of impressions of the papillary ridges of 

 the thumbs has been so much exploited in fiction that a general ex- 

 planation is unnecessary. This does not mean that an immense amount 

 of hard work had not to be done on it by Mr. Galton before a British 

 prison commission could adopt it. Besides the technique of taking 

 really good impressions it was necessary to prove, not assume, that the 

 patterns remain the same throughout life, that the variety of patterns 

 is really very great, and that they admit of being classified or indexed. 

 So when an individual set is submitted to an expert he can tell by refer- 

 ence to suitable records whether a similar set has been recorded. 



These things were successfully accomplished and Mr. Galton's 

 system of identification was adopted in Scotland Yard, and is now 

 widely used throughout the world. His books on the subject are 

 "" Finger Prints," " Blurred Finger Prints " and " Finger Print 

 Directory." 



Space can not be taken for a review of the various anthropological 

 questions which interested Mr. Galton, but a word must be said con- 

 cerning anthropometric laboratories. Writing of Darwin's provisional 

 theory of pangenesis in 1869, he said, 



The doctrine of pangenesis gives excellent materials for mathematical 

 formulas, the constants of which might be supplied through averages of facts, 

 like those contained in my tables, if they were prepared for the purpose. My 

 own data are too lax to go upon; the averages ought to refer to some simple 

 physical characteristic, unmistakable in its quality, and not subject to the 

 doubts which attend the appraisement of ability. 



