140 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



been scattered almost indiscriminately among the ten fingers ; yet Galton 

 failed to solve any anthropological problem by the aid of finger-prints*. 



In the matter of heredity he was more successful, he produced evidence 

 adequate enough to demonstrate that finger-prints were hereditary, but 

 neither he nor any one since has produced a satisfactory account of the 

 manner in which they are inherited. 



In later years t Galton formed a considerable collection of family prints 

 of the two forefingers only. These were tabled and reduced in 1920 by 

 Miss Ethel M. Elderton, who demonstrated the general inheritance of the ridge 

 patterns, but noted that two finger-prints were far from adequate to deter- 

 mine the intensity of heredity, as although a parental peculiarity of pattern 

 might pass to the same finger in the child, or with less probability to the 

 homologous finger, it might also pass to any one of the remaining eight 

 fingers ; this, if it happens to any individual finger with still less probability, 

 may occur with equal or even greater probability when we take into account 

 the total eight of them. While the existence of ten fingers in man is a 

 distinct advantage in the matter of personal identification — or if we like a 

 distinct misfortune to the criminal — it is also something of a misfortune to 

 the geneticist. At any rate Galton's work left much to be done in deter- 

 mining the organic correlations between prints of the different fingers in 

 the same individual { and the bearing of these organic correlations on the 

 problem of heredity in the ridges. Thus it came about that while Galton 

 did much pioneer work in the collection and co-ordination of material his chief 

 contribution to the subject was in the matter of identification. He was the 

 first to publish matter, largely due to Sir William Herschel, fully establishing 

 the persistence of finger-print patterns ; he was the first to show the nature of 

 their variety and to classify them, and lastly he was the first to prove that it 

 was possible to index them and rapidly to find, from a given set of prints, 

 whether their owner was already in the index. All these problems were 

 fundamental and must be definitely solved, if finger-prints were to be used for 

 police purposes. None of this spade work had been achieved or at any rate 

 published before Galton took up the subject. Before his day we have mere 

 suggestions of the possible usefulness of these prints. Within ten years from 

 his first study of the subject by the aid of his papers dealing with the prints 

 from a scientific standpoint, by repeated letters to the press, by action through 

 the British Association and by definite demonstrations in his Laboratory to 

 the Commission appointed by Mr Asquith to consider the question of criminal 

 identification in England, Galton had got not only bertillonage accepted in 



* More recent researches, for example, those of Kubo (1918) and Collins (1915), seem to 

 indicate that the Oriental races have a larger percentage of whorls and fewer ulnar loops than 

 the European races. But the results are doubtful because there is a large personal equation in 

 the matter of classification. I think we must conclude with Stockis {Revue Anthropologiqne, 

 Annee 1922, p. 92) that the results reached (thirty years after Galton) are still not adequate 

 to admit of our asserting the existence of well-defined ethnic differences in finger-prints. 



t See Biomelrika, Vol. n, p. 365, 1903. Collection made in the years 1903 to 1905. 



\ A beginning was made in the study of the organic correlation of finger-prints by 

 Dr H. Waite, Biometrika, Vol. x, p. 421 el seq. 



