344 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 4 



THE BEGINNINGS OF FORENSIC SCIENCE— ANTHROPOMETRY 



Conscience forbids our allowing an individual to be punished for an 

 offense he has not committed. The first duty of the law is therefore 

 to discover and identify the guilty party. The identification of the 

 criminal is of still greater importance when there is any question of 

 applying the laws regarding persistent offenders, which prescribe 

 heavier penalties for other than first offenders. 



There are thus two very different aspects of judicial identification. 

 First, it is necessary to discover the person guilty of an offense, or, in 

 other words, to prove that the person in question, and he alone, has 

 committed it. Second, when a delinquent is thus convicted of a crime, 

 it is necessary to investigate whether he has previously committed 

 other offenses, in which event a heavier penalty would be entailed. 



Bertillon was the first person to solve this problem and, from this 

 point of view, must be considered a pioneer. Before 1885, there were 

 no exact rules for the recognition of old offenders. The most usual 

 method was to introduce prisoners in the pay of the police into the 

 cells of the individuals suspected of having committed previous of- 

 fenses, with the object of getting the suspects to talk and obtaining 

 information from them, directly or indirectly, about their past life. 

 Or else, if this method failed, another course open to the police was 

 to parade the prisoners arrested the previous day, to see if they recog- 

 nized any of them. If the latter denied accusations, it was impossible 

 to prove that they were lying. In practice, all these methods failed 

 in over 80 percent of cases. 



People had, of course, already thought of using photography to 

 identify criminals ; and as early as 1854 an examining magistrate in 

 Lausanne succeeded in having a dangerous criminal arrested in the 

 Grand Duchy of Baden by circulating a daguerreotype of the "want- 

 ed" man through all the Swiss cantons and the adjacent countries; 

 but such cases were the exception rather than the rule. The intro- 

 duction of gelatinobromide plates and papers, which made it easier to 

 obtain negatives and to print copies, enabled certain police depart- 

 ments to build up photograph albums of portraits of criminals known 

 to the police, in order to facilitate their subsequent recognition. Ex- 

 perience showed that the desired aim was seldom achieved, for the 

 very simple reason that, though it was easy enough to build up files 

 of photographs of all persons arrested or convicted of an offense, it 

 was impracticable to trace such persons in the files. 



It was, in fact, impossible to devise a systematic method of filing 

 these photographs so that the individual sought could be found by a 

 gradual process of elimination. The more photographs that were 

 added, the more difficult the problem became; and despite all its ap- 

 parent advantages, the system had to be dropped. Bertillon himself 

 later tried to develop a suitable filing system, but he, too, failed. 



