636 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1912. 



independently. If there is one thing that we know surely, it is the fact 

 of the scarcity of original ideas among mankind, which may stand in 

 relation to reproduced ideas as 1:100. The fact remains that, how- 

 ever simple and self-evident the system may now look to us, the most 

 advanced civdized nations liave never hit upon it, that no trace of it 

 can be discovered among Egyj^tians or Babylonians, Greeks or Ro- 

 mans, and that its so very recent adoption into our culture, after pro- 

 longed contact with. east-Asiatic nations, is in itself suspicious of a 

 derivation from a foreign source. The hypothesis, therefore, seems 

 to be justified that Chinese immigrants into India may have carried 

 the idea over, or that the long religious and commercial intercourse 

 between the two countries may be responsible for the transmission. 

 It is out of the question to assume the reverse course of events, for 

 the application of finger prints in China is of great antiquity, eVen 

 greater than ever suspected heretofore, while nothing of the kind can- 

 be proved for its antiquity in India. 



At all events it seems certain that fhiger impressions were known 

 in India prior to the time of Herschel. George A. Grierson,* one of the 

 best connoisseurs of modern Hmdu life, in describing the ceremonies at 

 the birth of a child, mentions the fact that the midwife, usmg red lead, 

 makes a finger print on the wall, mth the mtention of hastenmg 

 delivery. It is hard to imagiae that this magical conception of the 

 finger print, which is an i^igi'edient of indigenous folklore, should be 

 credited to the discovery of Herschel. There are, further, good 

 reasons to presume that the marks on the finger bulbs were familiar 

 to the Indian system of palmistry. I recently had occasion to study 

 an ancient Sanskrit treatise on pamting, the Citralakshana,^ wliich 

 is preserved in a Tibetan translation embodied in the Tanjur. One 

 chapter of this work is taken up with a detailed description of the 

 physical qualities of the Cakravartin, the wdieel-turnuig king, the 

 hero and racial ideal who formed the principal object of ancient 

 paintmg. The majority of the marks of beauty attributed to him 

 are derived from the rules of physiognomy, a system reachmg back 

 to remote times; some of these marks, by way of comparison of the 

 Sanskrit with the old Persian tenns, are traceable to the Aryan 

 period when the Iranians and Indians still formed a united stock of 

 peoples. The interpretation o| prominent physical qualities, as laid 

 down by the physiognomists, led to artistic attempts of portrayal, 

 and for this reason I was induced to study, m comiection with the 

 Citralakshana, two Indian treatises on physiognomy contained like- 

 wise in the Tibetan Tanjur, with the result that the terminology of 

 physiognomy and art theory are identical, and that the rules of the 

 pamter closely follow in. the trail of the physiognomist and palmist. 



1 Bihar Peasant Life. Calcutta, 1885, p. 388. 



* Edited and translated under the title Dokumente der Indischen Kunst, I, l.,eipzig, 19I3. 



