Hand and 
of the Christophle house. Then the 
ape ran up a rain-pipe, reached the win- 
dow, entered the room, attacked the 
girl, beat and choked her to death and 
upset the lamp in the struggle. Finally 
it escaped in the way it came.” 
GALTON’S PIONEER WORK 
Whatever the outcome of this case, 
there is no room for doubt about the 
utility of finger-prints in police adminis- 
tration nowadays. Their use was first 
systematized and made popular by 
Sir Francis Galton, who had heard of a 
primitive form of finger-print registra- 
tion in Bengal. 
After collecting and classifying thous- 
ands of prints, Galton reached the 
conclusion that the chance of two 
finger-prints being identical is less than 
1 in 64,000,000,000, so if the number of 
human beings alive is reckoned as 
1,600,000,000, there is a smaller chance 
than one in four that the print of a 
single finger of any given person would 
be exactly like that of the same finger 
of any other member of the human 
race. When two fingers are considered, 
the improbability of identity becomes 
squared, with three fingers it is cubed, 
and so on. As police officials usually 
take all ten fingers, the chance of finding 
any two sets alike is wholly outside the 
range of human probability: actually, 
all possibility of error is eliminated. 
Galton spent a great deal of time 
working up a classification of finger- 
print patterns which would permit 
them to be indexed and readily referred 
to; his system, with some improvements 
by Sir Edward R. Henry of the London 
Police Department, is now in general 
use in civilized countries and has proved 
thoroughly satisfactory. 
Emphasis has been given to the 
impossibility of finding two sets of 
prints that are identical; this impos- 
sibility extends even to the prints of 
duplicate or so-called identical twins, 
who might be quite indistinguishable 
by photograph, by Bertillon measure- 
ments, or by any other system of 
identification that has been devised. 
Nevertheless the prints of twins of this 
Foot Prints 
521 
sort are much more alike than the 
prints of two persons picked at random, 
or even of two ordinary brothers—a 
fact which indicates that the main 
features of the pattern, at least, are 
inherited. 
J. H. Taylor has furnished the photo- 
graph reproduced in Fig. 18 of two 
young Pennsylvania Irishmen who en- 
listed in the United States Navy at 
about the same time and were sent to 
the same training school. One was 
1 inch taller than the other; but when 
they were not together no one could 
tell which of the twins he was addressing. 
The commanding officer was so much 
worried that he attempted to evade the 
problem by putting them in separate 
companies. Their likeness led to 
troubles which finally resulted in their 
withdrawal from naval life. Their 
finger-prints, reproduced in Fig. 19, 
will probably at first glance be indis- 
tinguishable to the reader, but more 
careful study shows slight differences 
which would give them different classi- 
fications and permit no chance of con- 
fusion in the mind of an expert. 
INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY 
The finger-prints of these twins sug- 
gest that heredity largely, but not 
wholly, determines the pattern. Galton 
made the first serious study of this 
point, taking ordinary pairs of brothers. 
He found there was more often likeness 
between their finger-prints, than was 
the case with two individuals taken at 
random, a fact which indicates heredi- 
tary influence. 
Since then Dr. Harris H. Wilder, 
Professor of Zoology at Smith College, 
Northampton, Mass., has given especial 
attention to the inheritance of palm 
and sole patterns. Describing the pat- 
terns of duplicate twins, he points out’ 
that the general type is usually the 
same, although there is room for much 
variation in the details. “It is as 
though identical forces had directed the 
development in the two individuals, 
but that the material had yielded a little 
unequally to the strain of growth, a 
given area being a little more expanded 
7 American Journal of Anatomy, Vol. iii (1904), pp. 387-472. 
