Personal Identification and Description 153 



modification of Galton's method of indexing was introduced by Sir Edward 

 Henry*. In 1895 Galton had published his Finger' Print Directories, which 

 contained a great improvement on his previous method of classification; this 

 later method was in most essential points identical with that in use in 1909 

 at Scotland Yard. The article in the Times called Sir George Darwin into 

 the field ; he concluded a letter which puts forward the simple facts of the 

 matter with the words : 



"Sir Edward Henry undoubtedly deserves great credit in recognising the merits of the system 

 and in organising its use in a practical manner in India, the Cape and England, but it would 

 teem that the yet greater credit is due to Mr Francis Galton." 



One has to remember that identification by finger-prints was in use at 

 Scotland Yard long before Sir Edward Henry came on the scene t, but the 

 indexing was by bertillonage. Dr Garson, the former director, was too much 

 of an anthropologist and had a mind of too little inventive power to give up 

 the anthropometric index. A dozen different ways of breaking up the large 

 loop categories would occur to an inventive mind, and as soon as one of these 

 had been tried and found successful bertillonage was bound to disappear. 

 The fact remains that nothing was done and no progress made in abolishing 

 bertillonage, until Sir Edward Henry succeeded Dr Garson. This absence 

 of progress was not Galton's fault, but lay with the Government, which 

 selected for the post of director an old-school medical anthropologist rather 

 than a finger-print expert. 



While it is absolutely impossible for one who has really studied finger- 

 prints to confuse A's prints with those of B, it is always possible for a clerk to 

 make an error in extracting the dossier, which corresponds to the identified 

 finger-prints. Such a clerical lapse occurred in a case tried at the Guildhall 

 in 1902, and the occasion was seized upon to attack the finger-print method 

 by certain newspapers. Galton wrote a letter on the matter to Truth (October 

 2, 1902, Vol. lii, p. 78G). He pointed out that there was no doubt about the 

 identification, but when it came to turning up the record attached to the 



* In March 1897 Major-General Strahan and Sir Alexander Pedler reported on the system 

 of identification by Finger-Prints as adopted in India. It was really a report on Henry's work 

 and methods. In the course of the Report the three conditions laid down by Mr Asquith's 

 Committee (see our p. 150) are cited and the following words occur : 



" In the same report it is acknowledged that Mr Galton's finger-print method completely met the first and 

 third conditions, but they disapproved of his method of classification." 



This is a complete mis-statement of what the Committee did. Galton was not prepared at 

 that date to provide a comprehensive method of indexing, accordingly it was impossible for 

 the Committee to disapprove of his method of indexing. It was Galton himself who suggested 

 indexing by bertillonage and this the Committee accepted, although both they and he looked 

 upon it as a temporary stage. Galton's Secondary Classification was complete and published in 

 1895 (see our pp. 199 et seq.), and in the present writer's opinion there is little in Henry's book of 

 1901, which cannot be found, often better expressed, in Galton's of 1895 or in his earlier writings. 

 The numerical notation is the chief novelty. We do not think the statement we have quoted 

 above should have been allowed to appear without a qualifying note in Henry's Classification 

 and Uses of Finger Prints (p. 112). 



t I myself witnessed the rapid identification of criminals by their finger-prints in 1900. 



p o ni 20 



