An Introduction to a Biology 



tried to persuade M. Bertillon to incorporate finger prints 

 into his system of identification, but without success. He 

 found, however, that they had already been employed by 

 Sir WilHam Herschel in his district in India, who succeeded 

 in introducing them into Bengal and subsequently through- 

 out the whole of India. At the present day there are few 

 civihsed countries in which they are not employed for the 

 purposes of the identification of criminals. Galton's hopes 

 that finger prints would prove to be of high anthropological 

 significance were not fulfilled. He was unable to find that 

 any particular type is characteristic of members of widely 

 divergent human races ; or of such widely different types 

 within a single race as " students of science, students of 

 art, Quakers, notabilities of various kinds and a considerable 

 number of idiots at Earlswood Asylum." Only one result 

 of positive theoretical significance emerged from this study : 

 this was the demonstration that the variation of the pattern 

 was of the discontinuous kind, and the conclusion that the 

 various types had been evolved without the aid of natural 

 selection. 



It is a curious coincidence — if indeed it be a coincidence — 

 that the respective founders of two great schools of heredity, 

 the Biometric and the Mendehan, were born in the same year. 

 Galton and Mendel were both born in 1822. Galton (" Mem- 

 ories of My Life," p. 308), with characteristic courtesy, refers 

 to Mendel's work immediately before he refers to his own 

 law. His estimate of the significance of the work done 

 and inspired by Mendel seems to us to be so true and con- 

 cise that we make no apology for quoting it together with 

 the rest of the paragraph in which it occurs : "I must stop 

 for a moment to pay a tribute to the memory of Mendel, with 

 whom I sentimentally feel myself connected, owing to our 

 having been born the same year, 1822. His careful and long- 

 continued experiments show how much can be performed 

 by those who, hke him and Charles Darwin, never or hardly 

 ever leave their homes, and again how much might be done 



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