142 



Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



cleanliest method of taking the impressions. In his Finger Prints of 1892 

 Galton says that 



"My attention was first drawn to the ridges in 1888, when preparing a lecture on Personal 

 Identification for the Royal Institution, which had for its principal object an account of the 

 anthropometric method of Bertillon, then newly introduced into the prison administration of 

 France. Wishing to treat of the subject generally, and having a vague knowledge of the value 

 sometimes assigned to finger marks, I made inquiries, and was surprised to find, both how 

 much had been done, and how much there remained to do, before establishing their theoretical 

 value and practical utility." (p. 2.) 



Fig. 16. Finger Prints of Sir William J. Herschel at an interval of 28 years. From Galton's Finger 

 Prints, Plate 15, Right Forefinger. Second method of marking minutiae. 



I do not think that it can be asserted that Galton failed to recognise 

 what work had been previously published, except in the case of Nehemiah 

 Grew*, and from him he would indeed have learnt very little, had he known 

 of him. That the pores were on the ridges, not in the furrows, Galton 

 probably found out from his own observation f. 



* Alix's paper of 1868 (see our p. 143 ftn. t) and Klaatsch's of 1888 are referred to on 

 p. 60 of the Finger Prints, but more stress possibly might have been laid on the former. 



■\ In the Memories, pp. 257-8, is an amusing account of Herbert Spencer's view on the 

 relation of ridges to pores: 



" I may mention a characteristic anecdote of Herbert Spencer in connection with this. He asked me to 

 show him my Laboratory and to take his prints, which I did. Then I spoke of the failure to discover the origin 

 of these patterns, and how the fingers of unborn children had been dissected to ascertain their earliest stages, 

 and so forth. Spencer remarked that this was beginning in the wrong way; that I ought to consider the 

 purposes the ridges had to fulfil, and to work backwards. Here he said, it was obvious that the delicate mouths 

 of the sudorific glands required the protection given to them by the ridges on either side of them and therefrom 

 he elaborated a consistent and ingenious hypothesis at great length. I replied that his arguments were 

 beautiful and deserved to be true, but it happened that the mouths of the ducts did not run in the valleys 

 between the crests, but along the crests of the ridges themselves. He burst into a good-humoured and up- 

 roarious laugh and told me the famous story which I had heard from each of the other two who were 

 present at the occurrence. Huxley was one of them. Spencer, during a pause in conversation at dinner at the 

 Athenaeum said, 'You would little think it, but I once wrote a tragedy.' Huxley answered promptly, 'I know 

 the catastrophe.' Spencer declared it was impossible, for he had never spoken about it before then. Huxley 

 insisted. Spencer asked what it was. Huxley replied: 'A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact'." 



