Personal Identification and Description 147 



Inspector-General of Jails in Bengal], known only to literature* as 'My 

 dear B — ' and is luminously certified as 'True copy of office copy,' but by 

 whom certified is not stated." (Guide to Finger Print Identification, p. 36.) 

 It was clearly impossible to deal patiently with a controversialist of this type, 

 who first demands to see a document and when it is exhibited waits ten years 

 before attempting to throw discredit on it ! I have rarely known Galton 

 moved. He certainly was moved on this occasion. He wrote the notice of 

 Faulds' book which appeared in Nature, Vol. Lxxn, Supplement, p. iv 

 (October 19, 1905). Anyone who has read the literature on this topic up 

 to 1905 can only agree with what Galton states. If it is severe on Dr Faulds, 

 the severity was warranted. I cite a portion of it : 



"Dr Faulds was for some years a medical officer in Japan, and a zealous and original in- 

 vestigator of finger-prints. He wrote an interesting letter about them in Nature, October 28, 

 1880, dwelling upon the legal purposes to which they might be applied, and he appears to be 

 the first person who published anything, in print, on this subject. However his suggestions of 

 introducing the use of finger-prints fell flat. The reason that they did not attract attention 

 was presumably that he supported them by no convincing proofs of three elementary pro- 

 positions on which the suitability of finger-prints for legal purposes depends : It was necessary 

 to adduce strong evidence of the, long since vaguely alleged, permanence of those ridges on the 

 bulbs of the fingers that print their distinct lineations. It was necessary to adduce better 

 evidence than opinions based on mere inspection of the vast variety of minute details of those 

 markings, and finally, for purposes of criminal investigation, it was necessary to prove that a 

 large collection could be classified with sufficient precision to enable the officials in charge of it 

 to find out speedily whether a duplicate of any set of prints that might be submitted to them 

 did or did not exist in the collection. Dr Faulds had no part in establishing any one of these 

 most important preliminaries f. But though his letter of 1880 was, as above mentioned, the 

 first printed communication on the subject, it appeared years after the first public and official 

 use of finger-prints had been made by Sir William Herschel in India, to whom the credit of 

 originality that Dr Faulds desires to monopolise is far more justly due 



"The question of the priority of dates is placed beyond doubt, by the reprint of the office copy 

 of Sir William's 'demi-official' letter of August 15, 1877, to the then Inspector of Prisons in 

 Bengal. This letter covers all that is important in Dr Faulds' subsequent communication of 

 1880, and goes considerably further. The method introduced by Sir Wm. Herschel, tentatively 

 at first as a safeguard against personation, had gradually been developed and tested, both in 

 the jail and in the registering office, during a period from ten to fifteen years before 1877 as 

 stated in the above quoted letter to the Inspector of Prisons. 



"The failure of Sir Wm. Herschel's successor, and of others at that time in authority in 

 Bengal, to continue the development of the system so happily begun, is greatly to be deplored, 

 but it can be explained on the same grounds as those mentioned above in connection with 

 Dr Faulds. The writer of these remarks can testify to the occasional incredulity in the early 

 'nineties concerning the permanence of the ridges, for it happened to himself while staying at 

 the house of a once distinguished physiologist, who was the writer when young of an article on 

 the skin in a first class encyclopaedia, to hear strong objections made to that opinion. His 



* The India List for 1876-1877 would have at once informed Dr Faulds that Mr Beverley 

 was, in August 1877, Inspector-General of Prisons in Bengal. Herschel also wrote to the 

 Registrar-General, Sir James Bourdillon, who later expressed regret that he had allowed the 

 suggestion to slip through his fingers. See Sir William J. Herschel, The Origin of Finger 

 Printing, Oxford, 1916, p. 25. 



t Actually after his letter to Nature of 1880, he published no scientific contribution to the 

 subject before Galton took it up in 1888; he wasted eight years. Then Galton published his 

 books and papers, and only in 1905 does Dr Faulds issue a work which could be even considered 

 a scientific contribution to the subject, and then of so acrimonious a character that it is of 

 negligible value. 



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