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Society through the medium of its Journal, in which he regularly read 

 their proceedings with great interest, and he was very pleased to have the 

 opportanity of being with them on that occasion. He was, however, hardly 

 ready to give them any very carefully prepared communication, as he was 

 present almost unexpectedly, for having called upon his friend, Mr. Baker 

 during the day, he had been asked by him to come and bring before them 

 what he thought was a new topic in connection with Microscopy, one upon 

 which he had read several papers at the San Francisco Microscopical 

 Society. He had called it " Microscopic Graphiology," and he believed it 

 would be found to supply one answer to the question " What good was 

 there in Microscopy?" The subject, as its name implied, was that of the 

 examination of handwriting under the microscope, with a view of ascer- 

 taining its minute peculiarities as a means of identification. It was, of 

 course, well known that the Microscope had long been used as a means of 

 examining the texture of paper, erasures, differences in inks, lines crossing 

 each other, and other features, by legal men in cases where questions arose 

 as to the genuine character of documents ; but he had gone much beyond 

 this in endeavouring to formulate some other methods of examination in a 

 way that could be understood by any intelligent observer. He believed that 

 he had succeeded in so formulating the ideas that in the course of a few 

 months they would be in print, so that anyone interested in the subject 

 would be able to read it for themselves. When, at any time, a question 

 arose in a court of law as to the genuineness or otherwise of hand- 

 writing, it was usual to call in ordinary experts to examine and pronounce 

 upon it, and these people appeared to do so by mere intuition. If questioned 

 as to their means of discrimination, they could not say why or how they 

 came to their conclusions, only that they felt sure — they were certain — 

 that the two specimens of writing were the same. His own attention was 

 particularly called to the subject by an article which appeared in the 

 "Bankers' Magazine," for July, 1878, the writer of which maintained that 

 there was in every handwriting, as seen under the microscope, a certain 

 rhythm or set of waves peculiar to, and distinctive of, each. These waves 

 were, as might be expected, very small, there being several hundreds of 

 them in a single inch, so that they were not to be seen by unassisted vision. 

 On carefully examining the subject, he found that there were three rhythms 

 in the handwriting of every man, each of which must be taken into con- 

 sideration in connection with the others. The first of these he called the 

 rhythm of form, by which it was meant that everyone had a certain method 

 of forming his letters peculiar to himself, and it was upon this that 

 ordinary experts chiefly relied. They used a hand lens or a doublet, but 

 there was no doubt that even for this purpose a microscope would be 

 of great use. In addition to the shape of the letters, another feature came 

 under this head ; for instance, a person in writing a letter would often make 

 several strokes in succession exactly at the same angle, and then there 

 would be a kind of break or change, and this would be repeated at regular 

 intervals, so that very often it was possible to identify handwriting by 

 this rhythm of form alone. The best description of this system which had 

 yet come unto his hands was one published by the Hon. Mr. Thistleton, in 

 which he gave an account of the methods of Mons. Chabot, the well known 



