MONKEY HANDPRINTS 



THE arrangement of the fine ridges and grooves on the 

 palmar aspect of the human hand has of late years been 

 studied with great attention first by Sir Francis Galton, 

 and subsequently by Mr. Henry, now Chief Commissioner 

 of the Metropolitan Police in order to develop a satisfactory 

 system of identification by means of " finger-prints." That 

 exceedingly important and interesting subject is not discussed 

 in the present article, in which attention is restricted to the 

 arrangement of these lines on the hands of monkeys, and 

 their function in both men and monkeys. This study 

 seems to have been first seriously taken up by Dr. D. 

 Hepburn, of Dublin, who communicated to the Dublin 

 Society the results of his investigations, which were duly 

 published in the Transactions of that Society. The method 

 employed by Dr. Hepburn was to take impressions of the 

 hands of living monkeys on plates of glass coated with 

 printers' ink ; but there are many difficulties connected with 

 this operation, and in preparing a series of impressions for 

 the Natural History Museum, it occurred to me that I might 

 be able to take them on paper from the hands of monkeys 

 recently deceased. I accordingly communicated with the 

 Prosector to the Zoological Society, asking him to be good 

 enough to send me the right hands of some of the monkeys 

 that died in the Society's menagerie. With this request he 

 very kindly complied, and from the specimens which from 



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