A GORILLA FINGER-PRINT 
This rolled finger print of the female gorilla ‘‘ Dinah”’ in the New York Zoo- 
logical Garden has been enlarged about three times. 
As J. H. Taylor, 
finger-print expert of the Navy, points out, it shows that the ridges in 
the great apes are quite as perfectly developed as they are in man. 
Identification experts have found it necessary to make a study of ape’s 
prints, in order that they may be distinguished from those of men in 
criminal cases. 
all his brothers had starved to death, 
childless. It may be so, but to believe 
it requires little less than the religious 
faith avowed by Tertullian: “‘Credo quia 
absurdum est; credo quia tmpossibile.”’ 
Without answering the ‘‘why’”’ of 
origin, but agreeing that the friction- 
skin now probably serves the purpose 
suggested in the name, and perhaps 
other purposes, we may investigate its 
development in the monkeys and apes. 
The lemur, a low form in the scale 
of evolution, has the foot-print shown 
in Fig. 14, the patterns of which are 
decidedly simple as compared with 
those of man. As we rise higher in 
the scale, we find the pattern becoming 
more complicated. The progression 1s 
not always what we would expect. 
Thus the hand of the chimpanzee is 
more human in form than that of any 
other ape; yet its palm-pattern 1s less 
complicated than that of the orang or 
gorilla, although more complicated than 
516 
Photograph from René Bache. 
(Fig. 16.) 
that of the gibbon, which is commonly 
held to be the most primitive anthro- 
poid. Andin man, whose palm-pattern 
is highly complex, the sole of the foot 
has a simpler pattern than that of the 
orang and gorilla—an evidence, some 
would say, that friction-skin on man’s 
sole is no longer of use to him. 
One distinction made by Lydekker 
is interesting. ‘‘In all the lower mon- 
keys that have been examined by both 
Dr. Hepburn and myself the pattern 
of the papillary ridges is of the con- 
centric type, in which the central ridges 
are longitudinal and the external ones 
form broad ellipses. Inthe chimpanzee, 
however, and probably also in some or 
all of the other manlike apes, the pattern 
on the balls of the fingers is of the form 
known as the looped type, which is of 
common occurrence in the fingers of 
the human hand. On the finger-tips 
of man alone occurs the still more com- 
