Personal Identification and Description 145 



Bei'tillon's letter to Gal ton of 1894* (see above) indicates where the 

 inspiration originated. Galton was ever ready to acknowledge others' work 

 in any field, and not less in finger-printing. Thus in 1891 he gave a full 

 account of Forgeot's excellent work on blurred finger-prints t, and of the 

 latter 's methods of bringing up and photographing greasy finger marks on 

 glass or metal. We have still in the Galtoniana the exhibit Galton made at 

 the Royal Society Soiree of that year of Dr Forgeot's imprints of the entire 

 hand. 



In 1905 Dr Henry Faulds published a work entitled: Guide to Finger- 

 Print Identification. It would have been in some respects a useful book had 

 it not made exaggerated claims for the author's achievements in this field, 

 which are accompanied by remarks belittling what Sir William Herschel had 

 practically achieved and what Galton had carried out experimentally. Dr Faulds 

 entirely overlooks the fact that up to 1904, beyond his original letter of 1880 

 in Nature, he had himself published nothing on the subject, which could reach 

 men of science. That letter, if suggestive, was by no means convincing; it needed 

 the experience that Herschel provided of the permanence of types, and of 

 the practical utility for identification to induce a man in the first rank of 

 science to take up the subject and study it effectively. It is noteworthy that 

 Dr Faulds in his chronological bibliography of the subject of finger-printing, 

 starts with his own letter in Nature of 1880, and proceeds nearly year by 

 year till he comes to 1890, and then passes to 1894 omitting from his biblio- 

 graphy all reference to Galton's memoirs and books ! The whole tone of the 

 book was distinctly unpleasing and seemed directly calculated to excite 

 resentment in the minds of workers in the same field, who had done far more 

 than Dr Faulds for the subjectj. In regard to the claims of Dr Faulds we 

 must remember that his original letters to Darwin and to Nature were 

 written from Japan. The letters from Kumagusu Minakata to Nature, Vol. 

 li (1894), pp. 199 and 274 prove that the use of the finger-print as a sign- 

 manual on legal documents was familiar in Japan up to 1869 ; thus when 

 a husband divorced his wife, he signed the statement of reasons with his own 

 index-finger. The use of the finger-print as a sign-manual seems to have come 



* A further letter of Bertillon's of July 3, 1896, indicates his view of finger-prints even two 

 years later: 



" Jusqu'a ce jour, en effet, les empreintes digitales n'ont ktk prises dans mon service qu'a titre de marques 

 particulieres, destinees a affirmer l'identit^ individuelle, et cela en dehors de toute classification au moins 

 quant a present." 



t " Imprints of the Hand," by Dr Forgeot of the Laboratoire d'anthropologie criminale, 

 Lyon, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. xxi, p. 282, November 10, 1891. 



\ "Of Sir William's mute, or at least inarticulate, musings over a period of some twenty years 

 in India, I in Japan knew nothing" (p. 37). "Mr Galton who frequently acts as a graceful 

 chorus to Sir William" (p. 36). "Mr Collins (now Inspector), who after some training by Mr 

 F. Galton, who had recently begun the study, took charge of the Finger Print Department" 

 [i.e. at Scotland Yard] (p. 5). It is needful to repeat that Galton began his researches early 

 in 1888, that he had by 1895 accumulated from all quarters of the world a larger collection of 

 finger-prints than any other living man, and had published more work about them of a high 

 scientific order than any one previously and, I may add, since. 



pgiii 19 



